Introducing COMEPELDA: Comprehensive European Parliament electoral data covering rules, parties and candidates
| Author | Thomas Däubler,Mihail Chiru,Silje SL Hermansen |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165211053439 |
| Subject Matter | Forum |
Introducing COMEPELDA:
Comprehensive European
Parliament electoral data
covering rules, parties and
candidates
Thomas Däubler
School of Politics and International Relations, University College
Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Mihail Chiru
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of
Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Median Research Centre,
Bucharest, Romania
Silje SL Hermansen
iCourts –The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of
Excellence for International Courts, University of Copenhagen,
Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European
Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal
electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and
individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key vari-
ables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country,
party, candidate, member of parliament) and join them with external information.
Currently, the data cover four elections (1999–2014). Among other aspects, the collec-
tion should facilitate research on the European Parliament’s allegedly weak electoral
connection. In this article, we outline the main features of the datasets, describe patterns
Corresponding author:
Thomas Däubler, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4,
Ireland,
Email: thomas.daubler@ucd.ie
Forum
European Union Politics
2022, Vol. 23(2) 351–371
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165211053439
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
of intra-party competition and preference voting and conduct exploratory analyses of
individual-level changes in list positions.
Keywords
European Parliament, electoral systems, election results, candidate selection, political
careers
Introduction
The European Parliament (EP) operates in an intricate political setup regarding both
its relations with other European Union (EU) institutions and its intra-chamber
dynamics. Its members (MEPs) come from up to 28 member states and represent dif-
ferent national parties. At the same time, most national parties are affiliated to
European party groups. Moreover, while MEPs deal with European matters, their
recruitment occurs in elections that are formally and practically independent national-
level contests (De Vreese and van der Brug, 2016; Reif and Schmitt, 1980; Van der
Brug et al., 2022).
Empirical research into the behavior of MEPs has expanded considerably in the past
decades, matching the empowerment of the legislature (for comprehensive reviews, see
Hix and Høyland, 2014; Ripoll Servent, 2018; Yordanova, 2011). Most of these studies
assume that the behavior of MEPs lacks an electoral connection in the sense that it is not
motivated by re-(s)election concerns and is without electoral consequences. This assump-
tion remains the standard view among EP scholars (Hix and Høyland, 2013; Judge and
Earnshaw, 2008). However, systematic empirical studies of such electoral causes and
consequences are scarce and somewhat limited in scope.
1
This remains a limitation of the literature on this topic because the large variety of
electoral systems used in EP elections (Däubler and Hix, 2018; Farrell and Scully,
2007) may result in considerable heterogeneity in representational behavior (e.g.
Bowler and Farrell, 2011; Hix, 2004; Hix and Hagemann, 2009) and electoral account-
ability (Sorace, 2021; Wilson et al., 2016). For example, several larger member states use
subnational districts, which have become more prevalent since 2004 with their introduc-
tion in France (Navarro, 2016) and the EU accession of Poland. In addition, the use of
preferential voting is now more widespread. No fewer than 10 of the 13 countries that
have joined the EU since 2004 use flexible or open rather than closed lists.
An obstacle to empirical research into electoral incentives and effects is the lack of a
comprehensive data source. While plenty of excellent data on EP elections exist, there is
no consolidated and easy-to-use collection covering electoral rules, national- and
district-level results for parties and electoral information for individual candidates and
MEPs. What is already available from scattered sources includes classifications of elect-
oral systems (Farrell and Scully, 2007) and party lists (Däubler and Hix, 2018), national-
level election results for parties from the ParlGov database (Döring and Manow, 2020),
352 European Union Politics 23(2)
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