POP Member News
New book by Mark Franklin (European University Institute Florence and Trinity
College
Connecticut and past POP president)
Ten years ago I (Mark) made the mistake of writing a book about electoral behavior and
calling it "Choosing Europe?" The consequence is a book never opened by anyone
interested in Electoral Behavior and never read (beyond the first few pages) by anyone
interested in Europe (I exaggerate, of course, but this was a marked tendency).
Determined to not make the same mistake twice, my recent book about voting behavior
in Europe (Cambridge UP 2007) is entitled "The Economy and the Vote." This will no
doubt be opened by some political economists and some of those interested in electoral
behavior, but probably not by Europeanists.
I thought members of the POP section of EUSA might find it helpful to be told that,
despite its title, this is actually a book about Europe, which, in addition to addressing
fundamental questions about how the economy affects the vote and how to study such
effects, also addresses questions of interest to those who study Europe.
For example, if you have ever wondered why parties that are members of a coalition
government do not fare equally at election time, all losing or all gaining in step
depending on economic performance and other matters, this is a book for you. If you
have ever wondered whether the 'responsible party model' (holding parties accountable
for their performance in office) is appropriate for countries that have coalition
governments, this is also a book for you. The book answers both these questions in ways
that I think you will find unexpected and which illuminate the nature of democratic
governance in Europe. The book also addresses such questions as why coalition
governments find it particularly hard to engage in economic restructuring, using data
from European Parliament election studies conducted since 1989. These data are used not
to study the nature of representational processes at the European level (as were the data
employed in Choosing Europe?) but rather the nature of representational processes at the
national level, being very careful to test for contamination arising from the nature of the
data.
European Election Study 2009
For the first time since 1994, a full scale European Parliament election study has received
enough funding to be more than a holding operation. A 2.4 million euro grant (from the
EU's DG Research under their FP7 programme) has been awarded to the Robert
Schumann Center for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) of the European University Institute
(EUI), and a consortium of 14 collaborating institutions in nine countries. This grant will
fund a voters study, candidate study, party manifestos study, media study, and contextual
data study, all of which will be conducted in each of the 27 EU member states in
connection with the 2009 elections to the European Parliament. The study will constitute
a pilot study for a permanent infrastructure to collect data on European and national
elections so as to provide an ongoing basis for monitoring the quality of democracy in
Europe. Under the title 'Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy
in the European Union' (PIREDEU), the project started with a kick-off conference in
February 2008 at the EUI in Florence.
The first action of the new consortium was to inaugurate an 'Open Forum' on the
PIREDEU website (www.piredeu.eu) where we are soliciting suggestions from
prospective users for all five of the data collection instruments that will be under
development over the coming fifteen months. Not only are we hoping for good ideas that
can be transformed into new data that have not been previously collected, we are also
hoping for critiques of the ways in which such data have been collected in the past.
Members of the EUSA POP section are particularly invited to participate in this user
forum and to give us the benefit of their ideas. Data deriving from these five studies will
enter the public domain as soon as they are coded and cleaned. There will be no embargo
period. Those who contribute significantly in this way to the data collection effort will
also be invited to the final PIREDEU conference, to be held in 2010, where papers using
the new data (including papers authored by users who suggested new items or new ways
of measuring existing items) will be presented.
The User Forum opened in mid-April and will remain open for new suggestions until
mid-June 2008, after which it will be transformed into a means for soliciting user
responses to the resulting initiatives.
Please visit http://www.piredeu.eu for more details.
Mark Franklin (European University Institute Florence and Trinity College
Connecticut)
Upcoming publications by Gaspare Genna (University of Texas at El Paso)
Gaspare was recently at Utrecht University where he participated in the “Race, Ethnicity,
and Migration Studies” summer institute. There he presented some preliminary work on
public opinion, European identity, and prospects for supranational immigration policy
and was invited to submit the final draft of this research for a book chapter to be
published by Ashgate.
Gaspare’s paper, “Positive Country Images, Trust, and Public Support for European
Integration,” has been accepted for publication by Comparative European Politics.