Hidden Networks within the European Parliament: a Spatial Econometrics Approach

Giovanna Iannantuoni (), Elena Manzoni and Francesca Rossi ()
Additional contact information
Giovanna Iannantuoni: University of Milano-Bicocca

No 14/2019, Working Papers from University of Verona, Department of Economics

Abstract: The European political spectrum can be modelled as a two-dimensional space, whose interpretation has been investigated in the spatial voting literature by regression analysis. However, data on legislators' positions display spatial clustering that is not explained by the standard models. We account for correlation among legislators by modelling spatial dependence across countries, using a new sets of geopolitical and cultural metrics. We confirm the well known result that the first dimension of the European political space is mainly explained by the Members of European Parliament's ideological position on a left-right scale, although correlation across legislators cannot be neglected. We show that spatial correlation plays instead a central role when interpreting the more controversial second dimension of the political spectrum. The most relevant proximity measures are based on geographical proximity, institutional similarities and on three cultural metrics related to which issues play a central role in the political debate.

Keywords: European political space; spatial autoregressions; NOMINATE; proximity matrices; economic distances. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dse.univr.it/home/workingpapers/wp2019n14.pdf First version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:ver:wpaper:14/2019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Verona, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Reiter ().