Analyzing the cross-national comparability of Party Positions on the Socio-Cultural and EU Dimensions in Europe

Using survey vignettes and scaling techniques, we estimate common socio-cultural and European integration dimensions for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Previous research shows that economic left/right travels well across the EU, meaning that the placements of parties on that dimension are cross- nationally comparable; however, the social dimension is more complex, with different issues forming the core of the social dimension in different countries. The 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes anchoring vignettes which we use as \bridge votes" to place parties from different countries on a common social liberal/authoritarian dimension and a separate common scale for European integration. We estimate the dimensions using the Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey technique. The resulting scales offer cross-nationally comparable interval-level measures of a party's social and EU ideological positions.