"Coding Without Humans: A "real-time" database of the European Parliament"

Hoyland, Bjorn and Sircar, Indraneel. (2007) "Coding Without Humans: A "real-time" database of the European Parliament". In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 2007 (10th), May 17-19, 2007, pages 19, Montreal, Canada.

Abstract

The paper presents the first “real-time” database to the European Parliament (EP) research community. Quantitative research on the European Parliament has until now been associated with large start-up costs as an informative dataset about the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) has not been available. We offer a drastic reduction of these start-up costs through an online resource with updated information about membership of party groups, committee assignments and posts in the EP leadership since the first direct elections in 1979 until the present day. As a demonstration of the dataset, we conduct a natural experiment on the effect of party groups, comparing the voting behaviour of MEPs pre and post party switching.