European Elections and Domestic Politics: Lessons from the Past and Scenarios for the Future

Appendix A The voter study

Appendix A The voter study cees van der eijk and wouter van der brug The European Election Study (EES) 1999 comprises a voter study consisting of surveys of representative samples of the electorates of the then fifteen member states of the European Union: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands , Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The fieldwork for this study began immediately after the European Parliament elections of 9 and 13 June 1999. The first interviews were conducted on 14 June, the last ones on 8 July. The main part of the interviews was conducted in the two weeks between 14 and 27 June. The EES 1999 was organized by the European Elections Studies Group, an international group of researchers that, on the occasion of previous European elections in 1989 and 1994, organized similar surveys of the voting age populations of the member states of the European Union (see, e.g., Schmitt et al., 1997; van der Eijk et al., 1993).1 In spite of each study’s unique emphasis on particular aspects of European elections and the contexts within which they take place, each of these three studies is designed along similar principles. Therefore, the three European Election Studies of 1989, 1994, and 1999 offer not only ample opportunities for comparisons across political systems, but also for longitudinal comparisons (see e.g., 273 chapter 11 of this volume). All three studies are archived by and can be obtained fromSteinmetzArchives(http://www.dans.knaw.nl/nl/data/steinmetz_archief/), as well as from most other social science data archives (such as the Zentral Archiv in Cologne, or the ICPSR in Ann Arbor). The European Elections Study Group maintains a website that contains additional information about the EES data and about the work and publications of the EES group: http://www.europeanelection studies.net. The data from the EES 1999 were released to the general scholarly community in March 2002. This appendix provides some general information about the EES 1999, such as the sample sizes for each country and weighting of cases. The questionnaires of the EES 1999 were identical in the various member states, apart from minor but unavoidable differences generated by differences in party names and country-specific institutions. As a consequence the study offers wide opportunities for comparative analyses. Owing to a different form of data collection, the Italian data differ from those of the other member states in minor ways. A full documentation of these differences, and of all other characteristics of the study—including sampling procedures, response rates, wording of questions, response categories, and the exact wording of questions and response categories in the original languages—is provided in the codebook (van der Eijk et al. 2002). General profile of the study The EES 1999 is a stratified sample of the European population, in which each of the fifteen member states represents a stratum. In each of the fifteen member-states of the EU random samples were drawn of citizens eligible to vote in the European Parliament elections. The interviews were conducted by means of Computer Assisted Telephonic Interviewing (CATI), with the exception of Italy, where a tele-panel was used. The number of interviews conducted in the different member states of the European Union is presented in table A.1. Weighting Two kinds of weight variables are provided with the data and are used in this book. The first one is a political weight variable, which is described in more detail in the codebook. When applied, it generates a distribution of turnout and 274 Cees van der Eijk and Wouter van der Brug party choice that is identical to the actual results of the June 1999 European election in the respective countries (see appendix D). This variable was constructed in the same way as its counterparts in the 1989 and 1994 European election study datasets. Applying this weight leaves the effective number of cases unchanged from the raw data for each country, with the exception of Northern Ireland, where the number of interviews conducted was so small that it did not seem appropriate to weight them. The Northern Irish records have been assigned a value of zero (0) on this variable, so that using this weight excludes Northern Irish cases from the analysis. This variable was used in the country-specific analyses reported in this book. The second weight variable is a transformation of the first. This...