Parties, Elections, and Political Behaviour

Electoral Systems, Legislative Politics, and Democratic Institutions

Datasets

VoteWatch Europe

VoteWatch Europe was a not-for-profit organisation based in Brussels that tracked voting behaviour in the European Parliament and EU Council. The project was founded by Simon Hix, Doru Frantescu, and Sara Hagemann, and ran from 2008 until June 2022. The project used roll-call data collection and analysis techniques developed by Simon Hix and Abdul Noury. The data collected by VoteWatch can be downloaded here.

Citation: Simon Hix, Doru Frantescu & Sara Hagemann (2022) VoteWatch Europe European Parliament and EU Council Voting Data, September 2022.

Rise and Fall of Social Democracy, 1918-2017

This project, with Giacomo Benedetto (Royal Holloway) and Nicola Mastrorocco (Trinity College Dublin), looks at the correlates of the rise and decline of social democratic parties in 100 years of elections (between 1918 and 2017) – in 579 elections in 31 countries in Europe.  The dataset includes the election results for social democratic and other parties as well as a large number of political, economic, and social variables for every election.

Electoral System Design Project

This project, collaborative with John Carey (Dartmouth College) examines all elections between 1945-2006 in democracies with populations over one million — 610 elections in all, from 81 countries.  The dataset contains information on constitutional design and electoral rules (including mean and median magnitudes of districts in each election, legal thresholds, mixed-member formats), on disproportionality and party system fragmentation, on various indicators of political economy (growth rates, government spending, surpluses/deficits, inequality, human development index), and on demographic and historical information.

Roll Call Votes in the European Parliament

We have collected how each MEP voted in each record (roll-call vote) in the first six elected European Parliaments:

  • EP1 (July 1979-May 1984)
  • EP2 (July 1984-May 1989)
  • EP3 (July 1989-May 1994)
  • EP4 (July 1994-May 1999)
  • EP5 (July 1999-May 2004)
  • EP6 (July 2004-May 2009)

The data are publicly available for academic research, teaching or for any other not-for-profit activity.

European Parliament Research Group (EPRG) MEP Survey Data

This website presents a new survey of Members of the European Parliament MEPs conducted during 2015. The survey adds to a time series of MEP surveys carried out by the European Parliament Research Group. The data allow for comparison of MEPs’ views with those of the EU public, European Parliament candidates, and members of national and regional parliaments in Europe.