Coalitions in the EU Council: Pitfalls of Multidimensional Analysis

Běla Plechanovová ()
Additional contact information
Běla Plechanovová: Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Studies, Department of International Relations, Prague, Czech Republic

Czech Economic Review, 2011, vol. 5, issue 3, 249-266

Abstract: The paper identifies the main problems, which are encountered in the statistical analysis of the patterns of decision-making of the EU Council. Compared to most legislative bodies in democratic political systems, in the EU Council decision-making we only see a scarce occurrence of contested legislation and in these cases, only few dissenting positions of the legislators are recorded. Consequently, when analysing the dimensionality of the Council policy space, we have to deal with extremely lopsided data, which may pose serious problems to standard multivariate methods. The paper aims to identify these problems and discuss the implications for the inference on the coalition formation in the EU Council. The assessment is done based on distribution of the data on voting in the EU Council and results of multivariate methods which are available.

Keywords: Council of the EU; factor analysis; cluster analysis; multidimensional scaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://auco.cuni.cz/mag/article/download/id/115/type/attachment (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fau:aucocz:au2011_249

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://auco.cuni.cz/

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Czech Economic Review from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lenka Stastna ().