We investigate the dimensionality of politics in the European Parliament by applying a scaling method to all roll-call votes between 1979 and 2001 in the European Parliament. Contrary to most existing studies using these methods, we are able to interpret the substantive content of the observed...

This article looks at the development of the two main features of the party system in the European Parliament (EP): the organization of the party groups, and the nature of competition between these groups. On the organizational side, we examine the foundation of the party groups in the Common...

We use a dataset that allows us to circumvent a number of estimation difficulties that have plagued previous studies of the relationship between information and abstention. Our results show that information is a major determinant of abstention. © 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.