Prospects of Ideological Realignment ( s ) in the 2014 EP elections ?

Given the current economic and political crisis in Europe, many argue that the 2014 EP elections shifted the electoral competition from national politics to a debate about the extent and scope of the EU level of governance. We contribute to this discussion by analyzing the European ideological space at the time of the elections. We build upon existing scaling techniques applied to social media networks and develop a new method to measure the positions of political parties and individual legislators in a multidimensional political space. We apply this method to estimate the ideological positions of candidates to the European Parliament and the sitting MPs in all 28 EU states, relying on a new dataset of social media accounts. To validate our estimates, we compare them with the aggregate perceptions of parties' positions from the Voter Study of the European Election Study 2014. Our final goal is to analyze to what extent the 2014 EP elections brought the expected changes. We achieve this by establishing the relative importance of the left-right and European integration dimensions in each country. We also examine if and why the position of parties and candidates in EP elections differs from the position of parties and legislators in national parliaments.