What is this?
To make the above chart we've analyzed 1447 roll-call votes cast in the European Parliament from 2009 to 2011 using W-NOMINATE. The scaling method places the legislators (MEPs) in a two-dimensional space based on how they vote. If MEPs votes alike they are placed close to each other, the more they disagree the longer away from each other they are placed. The first dimension can be identified as a political left-right dimension and is explaining by far the most of the voting behavior. The second dimension is more difficult to recognize in the context of political divisions. One could make the guess that the second dimension would reflect an anti or pro attitude towards EU integration, but looking at the results this does not seem to fully explain the positioning of the different political groups.

Below the output of W-NOMINATE is shown. It can be seen that 51 legislators are deleted, those are the MEPs that has participated in less than 750 of the votes. 421 votes are deleted, these are votes where less than 5% voted differently than the rest of the Parliament. The Skree-plot tells us that is it reasonable to build a two-dimensional model.

SUMMARY OF W-NOMINATE OBJECT
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Number of Legislators:    708 (51 legislators deleted)
Number of Votes:          1447 (421 votes deleted)
Number of Dimensions:     2
Predicted Yeas:           457613 of 492522 (92.9%) predictions correct
Predicted Nays:           325141 of 359008 (90.6%) predictions correct
Correct Classifiction:    91.09% 91.92%
APRE:                     0.646 0.679
GMP:                      0.761 0.80
    

You can learn more about NOMINATE at Wikipedia or at Voteview. For more analysis on the European Parliament see itsYourParliament.

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