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Positions and Salience in European Union Politics: A New Dataset

This research note introduces a new dataset, called ‘Pep-Us,’ containing positional and salience estimates of parties and governments in the European Union. The point estimates, which all come with measures of uncertainty, pertain to nine important EU policy domains as well as a European Integration and an ideological scale. The dataset is based on statistics from hand-coded European party manifestos provided by the ‘Euromanifestos’ project (Wust and Volkens, 2003), and corrects for stochastic error using simulation (Benoit, Mikhaylov and Laver, 2009). The manifestos are scaled using a novel scaling technique for count data that employs principles from psychophysics (Lowe et al., 2010). For most European domestic parties and major European Parliament groups, the estimates range from 1979 to 2004, while for member state governments time-series between 1998 and 2007 are available. The dataset and replication material will be made freely available from a special website by November 2010.