Works in Progress

“Position-Taking in European Parliament Speeches” with Sven-Oliver Proksch. To be presented the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2008.

This article examines how national parties position themselves in European Parliament speeches. We apply a new computer-based technique, Wordfish, to estimate positions from speeches using the word counts to compare and place parties onto a single dimension. We test three hypotheses of position-taking in European Parliament speeches: a left-right ideology hypothesis, a pro/anti-Europe hypothesis, and a territorial politics hypothesis. Surprisingly, and in contrast to studies of roll call votes, we do not find evidence that national party positions from MEP speeches reflect the parties’ overall left-right ideology. Instead, these positions reflect the parties’ stance with regard to EU integration and national, redistributive characteristics. We test the robustness of our results by taking advantage of the multilingual environment of the European Parliament. The technique we employ is robust to translation across three languages (English, French, and German). Second, we use independent measures of national party positions from analyses of roll call votes and two expert surveys. Third, we apply a range of statistical models to account for measurement error and the hierarchical structure of the data. Our results remain robust across languages, various independent measures of party positions, and statistical models. This suggests that the entire corpus of MEPs speeches reflects national parties’ position on EU integration.

“Exit Costs, Veto Rights, and Integration: Bargaining Power in International Organizations and Federal Systems.” Earlier version presented at the European Union Studies Association, Montreal, May 2007.

Literature on bargaining within international organizations points to two potential sources of bargaining power: veto rights and exit rights. In some circumstances a member state may be able to veto an institutional change it opposes. In others, it may be able to threaten to leave the organization if its demands are not met. Finally, if exit from the organization is possible, other member states may be able to force a laggard member state to accept changes it opposes by threatening to kick the laggard out of the organization if the state does not agree to the proposed change. Under what circumstances do veto rights provide bargaining leverage and under what circumstances are exit threats a source of power? When would a member state prefer to use one of these sources of power over the other? Are both of these options available simultaneously or if one is available does that mean that the other is not? What implications does this have for political integration, and more broadly, the possible creation of a federal state? This paper seeks to answer these questions using a game theoretic model to examine the interaction between veto rights and exit threats in international organizations and federal states. My model has implications for European integration and can also help explain the conditions under which independent states give up sovereignty to form a stable federal union. I test the implications of the model through a case study of EU integration in the 1970s and 1980s.