Defining the EU political space - An empirical study of the European elections manifestos, 1979-1999

Descriptive models of the EU political space are fundamental components of both descriptions of EU politics and theories of EU policy making. But there is no consensus on which, if any, model accurately captures the EU political space. In this article, the authors seek to advance their understanding of the EU political space by bringing evidence to bear on the accuracy of four extant models. Following the methodology used to analyze the national political space of European democracies, they assemble and code manifestos of party federations written prior to European elections. They then use confirmatory factor analysis to analyze the underlying structure of these party federations' policy positions. They also examine temporal differences in party federation positions over several sets of issues. The results of the study indicate that the EU political space is basically one dimensional and similar to the domestic Left-Right dimension in policy content.