Cookies?
Library Header Image
LSE Research Online LSE Library Services

Applying ideal point estimation methods to the Council of Ministers

Hagemann, Sara ORCID: 0000-0002-0104-1782 (2007) Applying ideal point estimation methods to the Council of Ministers. European Union Politics, 8 (2). pp. 279-296. ISSN 1465-1165

Full text not available from this repository.
Identification Number: 10.1177/1465116507076433

Abstract

This research note addresses an increasingly popular topic in the EU literature, namely the measurement of policy preferences in the Council of Ministers. It aims to provide conclusions on three issues: (1) what data are in fact available from the Council, (2) how preferences are measured in other legislatures, and (3) whether these methods would be suitable for analyses of Council members' preference positions given the available data. Applying the popular scaling method NOMINATE and a Bayesian MCMC model to a data set consisting of all legislation adopted by the Council in 1999—2004, it is found that, although the two methods show similar voting patterns at the general level, the failure to report standard errors by NOMINATE in particular proves to be a severe problem when trying to identify individual governments' policy location. Conversely, the Bayesian approach provides a convincing method for analyses of Council decision records and is easily extended to include more advanced empirical information than merely the governments' decisions to support or oppose a proposal.

Item Type: Article
Official URL: http://eup.sagepub.com/
Additional Information: © 2007 Sage Publications
Divisions: European Institute
Subjects: J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe)
Date Deposited: 08 Aug 2013 15:18
Last Modified: 03 Feb 2024 19:15
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/51593

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item