Introducing COMEPELDA: comprehensive European Parliament electoral data covering rules, parties and candidates

We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, candidate, member of parliament) and join them with external information. Currently, the data cover four elections (1999–2014). Among other aspects, the collection should facilitate research on the European Parliament's allegedly weak electoral connection. In this article, we outline the main features of the datasets, describe patterns of intra-party competition and preference voting and conduct exploratory analyses of individual-level changes in list positions

Introduction: The need for further research on the European Parliament

The introduction is structured in four sections. It first makes an assessment of the very vast scientific literature that has been devoted to the European Parliament (EP), and explains that it is structured according to two dimensions: disciplines and methods. It then examines the six main topics addressed by scholars studying the EP. In a third section, it analyses the evolutions of the research in the field, underlining its recent decline, and deals with issues such as routinisation and over-specialisation. The introduction, moreover, underlines the need for new research agendas to account for the many evolutions of the EP. It finally describes the contents of the volume, which is structured in four parts, dealing respectively with the place of the EP within the EU political system, its role in the EU policy-making, its election and internal politics, and lastly its impact on EU policies