Parties as the missing link in regional politics?

Despite the lively discussion in recent years about the role of political parties in shaping European politics (e.g. [START_REF] Marks | Understanding Political Contestation in the European Union[END_REF], the analysis of the role of party politics in determining political outcomes at the European level has yet to develop. Many authors have referred to partisan motives when, for example, explaining treaty revisions, but only recently has there been a literature that systematically evaluates how partisanship affects political outcomes at the European level [START_REF] Manow | European Social Policy and Europe's Party-Political Center of Gravity, 1957-2003[END_REF]. In this vein, the article examines the influence of political partisanship on a specific policy outcome at the European Union level, namely the interregional redistribution in EU Structural Funds (SF) policy.

The current debate on the role of regional politics in the EU is dominated by two strands of argument, neither of which ascribes a central role to political parties. On the one hand, adherents of the intergovernmentalist perspective maintain that the political influence of regional actors is mostly absorbed by the logic of bargaining between national governments [START_REF] Pollack | Regional Actors in an Intergovernmental Play: The Making and Implementation of Economic Structural Policy[END_REF][START_REF] Allen | Cohesion and the Structural Funds: Transfers and Trade-Offs[END_REF]. On the other hand, scholars devoted to the multi-level governance approach argue that the integration of new policy areas -and especially the development of regional policy in the EU -has introduced regional actors into the evolving political system and created a third level. In particular, the so-called principle of partnership in the governance of SF has aroused considerable academic interest, since it requires that planning procedures are developed in close cooperation with subnational authorities such as local governments or social partners [START_REF] Evans | The EU Structural Funds[END_REF].

SF policy is the key mechanism of regional redistribution in the EU for which we propose an alternative route of investigation focusing on the role of (regional) partisan politics. To derive our hypotheses we rely on the traditional literature on partisan politics and redistribution at the national level. Partisan politics may act as a 'missing link' in the debate between the approaches of intergovernmentalism and multi-level governance, because it relates preferences to ideology rather than to the political fissures between national and regional actors. Empirically, we investigate the relationship between regional variation in partisan preferences -left vs. right and pro-Europe vs. anti-Europe -and the level of SF per capita that the respective regions receive. For this purpose we have constructed a data set that combines regional information on both elections and SF transfers. Our results indicate that there is a visible, though not very robust, relationship between the strength of left-wing political parties in a region and the size of the transfers that region receives. We also find a similar link between Eurosceptic parties and transfers, but this result is more sensitive to influential outliers.

Regional partisan politics applied to EU regional policy

Most political scientists agree that political parties play a pivotal role at the national level. Parties represent the ideological cleavages within the electorate, and should therefore affect policy. EU studies, however, are dominated by functionalist, institutionalist or intergovernmentalist approaches in which political parties are not at the centre of analysis. Research on parties in the EU has therefore focused mainly on either European elections ( Van der Eijk and Franklin, 1996) or the formation of the party system in the European Parliament [START_REF] Hix | Political Parties in the European Union[END_REF]. Because the consequences of partisan politics for EU policies have remained largely unnoticed, we will first explore the literature of partisan preferences and redistribution at the national level. Next, we will compare the SF policy of the EU with national redistribution. Finally, we will derive two hypotheses that link partisan politics and interregional redistribution in the EU.

Partisan politics and national redistribution

It is not at all obvious that partisan ideology can be 'mapped' into preferences for redistribution at a national level. In fact, the standard Downsian approach to political competition argues that parties should completely converge and that the size of redistribution depends merely on the characteristics of the median voter. An example is the hypothesis that the size of redistribution is determined by the relationship between median and mean income in a society [START_REF] Meltzer | Rational Theory of the Size of Government[END_REF]. [START_REF] Wittman | Platform Motivation: A Synthesis of Alternative Theories[END_REF] was one of the first to propose an alternative model that allows for ideological partisan preferences. Roemer (2001: 72) takes up his idea and shows that divergence between partisan manifestos is likely only if the Wittman model assumes uncertainty about the precise distribution of voter preferences.

The partisan argument has figured prominently in numerous empirical studies that investigate the amount of welfare spending in advanced economies [START_REF] Huber | Social Democracy, Christian Democracy, Constitutional Structure, and the Welfare State[END_REF], the specific form of redistributive policies implemented [START_REF] Boix | Political Parties, Growth and Equality: Conservative and Social Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy[END_REF] or the link between party manifestos and the policies of incumbent parties [START_REF] Klingemann | Parties, Policies, and Democracy[END_REF]. The empirical record is ambivalent, however, since a simple mapping of partisan ideology into policy output is difficult. First, the ideological structure of the 'voter space' may go beyond a simple one-dimensional division between 'left' and 'right'. Second, political institutions affect the aggregation of voters' preferences. It has been argued, for instance, that proportional or multi-party systems spend more money on redistribution than do majoritarian ones [START_REF] Persson | Do Political Institutions Shape Economic Policy?[END_REF].

The second point is particularly relevant for multi-tier political systems that are characterized by a complicated decision-making process of fiscal federalism. The addition of a cleavage between different political layers makes theoretical predictions fairly difficult (e.g. [START_REF] Dixit | Fiscal Federalism and Redistributive Politics[END_REF][START_REF] Persson | Do Political Institutions Shape Economic Policy?[END_REF]. Depending on the specific nature of the federalist institutions, subnational entities may have an incentive to extract rents from the central government. However, this effect is not unambiguous because decentralization arguably reduces the total level of rent extraction (see [START_REF] Rodden | Beyond the Fiction of Federalism: Macroeconomic Management in Multi-tiered Systems[END_REF]. In particular, the political economy of fiscal federalism does not render the partisan argument obsolete. For instance, [START_REF] Cadot | Contribution to Productivity or Pork Barrel? The Two Faces of Infrastructure Investment[END_REF] build a model that combines both partisan and pork-barrel politics in a model for national regional policy.

To conclude, the partisan model of public redistribution is far from flawless, but it remains the strongest competitor to political economy-based explanations along the lines of Anthony Downs. It clearly constitutes a simplification, but it deserves consideration as a parsimonious explanation of interregional redistribution in the EU.

Comparing national and EU-wide politics of interregional redistribution

EU regional policy fulfils the classic criteria of a redistributive policy. This is visible in the overall objectives governing the distributive mechanism, which have been reorganized under the recent Agenda 2000 reform into three focal areas: 'Objective 1' for the development of regions that are lagging behind in their economic development; 'Objective 2' for regions with declining industrial and rural sectors; and 'Objective 3' for the promotion of skill and employment policies in regions other than for 'Objective 1'. To qualify for Objective 1, the per capita GDP of a region must lie below 75% of the EU average. Objective 2 covers industrial regions with an unemployment rate above the EU average and a declining employment rate in the manufacturing sector.

The fact that Objective 1 is given clear financial priority shows the dominance of redistribution from rich to poor regions. Although the total amount of SF is not particularly large -around 0.3% of the GDP of the EU -it is significant for some regions. Regional redistribution in the EU currently accounts for one-third of the budget of the European Union. In the period 2000-6, the regions that receive most SF on a per capita basis are Madeira, with €2870 and the Azores, with €3590. These facts, taken together, show that, among all EU policies, SF are most directly comparable to national redistributive mechanisms.

The EU decision-making process is more complex and dynamic than national systems of fiscal federalism. The governance of SF has been evolving over the past two decades as a result of major reforms in 1988in , 1992in -3 and 1999[START_REF] Bache | The Politics of European Union Regional Policy: Multi-level Governance or Flexible Gatekeeping[END_REF][START_REF] Bailey | The 1988 Reform of the European Structural Funds: Entitlement or Empowerment?[END_REF]. Its complexity stems from several principles governing the allocation of regional transfers. One of these principles is 'additionality', which requires that SF transfers do not supersede national regional aid. Some scholars have argued that this principle was advocated primarily by regional actors and the Commission [START_REF] Bache | The Politics of European Union Regional Policy: Multi-level Governance or Flexible Gatekeeping[END_REF] in order to increase their budgets. 1 It is difficult, however, for the Commission to monitor nation-states on grounds of additionality (Allen, 2000: 257) since the implementation of structural policies is in the domain of nation-states. Another important principle is 'partnership'. According to it, planning procedures for SF should be developed in cooperation with subnational actors, such as local governments and social partners [START_REF] Hooghe | EU Cohesion Policy and Competing Models of European Capitalism[END_REF][START_REF] Evans | The EU Structural Funds[END_REF]. However, the 1988 reform granted a strong position to the Commission, which needs to approve the eligibility of a region under Objectives 1 and 2 [START_REF] Hooghe | The Politics of European Union Regional Policy[END_REF]. This seems to override the influence of subnational actors on the shaping of EU Structural Funds policy [START_REF] Allen | Cohesion and the Structural Funds: Transfers and Trade-Offs[END_REF].

Furthermore, national and EU-level politics differ, 2 and there is an important debate about how to structure the political space in Europe [START_REF] Hix | Political Parties in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Gabel | The Structure of Citizen Attitudes and the European Political Space[END_REF]. One of the crucial questions is whether there is an independent 'pro-EU' vs. 'anti-EU' cleavage alongside the traditional left vs. right cleavage. There is evidence that these two cleavages are at least not perfectly collinear, in that the EU topic becomes more and more established as a dimension of its own [START_REF] Marks | Understanding Political Contestation in the European Union[END_REF]. In this case, the redistributive logic of SF policies may not be a conflict just between richer and poorer regions. There are Eurosceptic parties at the regional level, mostly consisting of smaller and ideologically more radicalized parties [START_REF] Taggart | The Party Politics of Euroscepticism in EU Member and Candidate States[END_REF]. If Eurosceptic parties represent the losers from political integration, such as in those regions that benefit very little from the common market or monetary union, then they may have an impact on political outcomes. [START_REF] Boeri | Who's Afraid of the Big Enlargement? Economic and Social Implications of the European Union's Prospective Eastern Expansion[END_REF] argue that EU regional policy is aimed at precisely those regions that stand apart from the prospering core areas of economic integration. Hence, if there is an element of compensation attached to the distribution of SF, it may well be that this is a consequence of regional parties voicing their unease about integration.

All in all, SF policy is primarily about redistribution from rich to poor or declining regions. The bargaining and monitoring process of SF policy is rather complex, because it requires the interaction of three levels of government in accordance with the principles mentioned above and the set of criteria for Objectives 1 and 2. Moreover, the underlying voter space differs in one respect from national politics: there is a cleavage between pro-and anti-European positions. This cleavage arguably plays a minor role in national redistribution but it has to be kept in mind when we apply the partisan hypothesis to the bargaining on regional redistribution in the EU.

The bargaining process and channels of partisan influence on SF policy

There are two different logics embedded in the bargaining process. On the one hand, the Commission, the Council and the regional actors bargain over the selection of regions. On the other hand, regional actors try to influence the distribution of SF in a country. Both processes are intertwined, but they do not necessarily follow the same logic, as a closer inspection of the institutional rules shows. 3 The Council of Ministers first drafts a budgetary envelope for each Objective. The Commission then uses so-called 'transparent procedures' (i.e. official criteria) to distribute the budget between member states. Since not all of these criteria are operationalized in detail, the Commission has some discretionary power. However, the rule that national governments provide the short-lists of regions to the Commission limits this leeway. In the structural programming phase, the national governments and regional actors cooperate in designing specific development plans for each and every region. Member states must compile a selection of eligible Objective 1 and 2 regions with corresponding financial allocations. Once the plans are elaborated, the Commission and member states transform the plans into binding legal commitments. 4 Moreover, the 1999 bargaining process was embedded in negotiations on the general budgetary process for the period 2000-6. This meant that there was simultaneous bargaining on the size of the national shares between national governments (Heinelt et al., 2005: 116). The link between the two processes is arguably the selection of regions to qualify for SF, since this determines the size of national budgets. Intergovernmental negotiations on the EU budget have been studied extensively by many authors [START_REF] Rodden | Strength in Numbers? Representation and Redistribution in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Kauppi | What Determines EU Decision Making? Needs, Power or Both?[END_REF][START_REF] Zimmer | The Contested Council: Conflict Dimensions of an Intergovernmental EU Institution[END_REF]. In contrast to these studies, we are interested in the regional and not the national redistribution of SF. To simplify the following analyses we focus on the impact that parties have on the amount of regional transfers once national SF shares have been negotiated. Making this assumption allows us to abstain from dealing extensively with the various package deals between agricultural, cohesion and structural transfers, as well as the debate about the net payment position of countries. This assumption is problematic in that the selection of regions (for which international bargaining is important) and the allocation of funds (for which interregional bargaining is important) necessarily affect each other. Nevertheless, it has some empirical foundation, since the Berlin summit in 1999 yielded an agreement on the national distribution of SF but the precise regional allocation of SF was negotiated afterwards (Heinelt et al., 2005: 131).

Partisan politics at a regional level can intrude on this decision-making process at the level of regional transfers through two political channels. Regional actors can lobby either the next higher national level or the EU institutions directly. The former is a common phenomenon in national federalist systems. For example, the prime ministers of German federal states are aware of the redistributive consequences of changes in SF policy for their own electorates. They have acted as crucial veto players for the German central government when the latter aimed at reducing the size of spending on SF during the Berlin summit in 1999 (Heinelt et al., 2005: 179). Partisan bonds between regional and central governments have been shown to be important determinants of the allocation of national investment policies [START_REF] Kemmerling | The Contribution of Local Public Infrastructure to Private Productivity and Its Political-Economy: Evidence from a Panel of Large German Cities[END_REF]. It is reasonable to assume a similar tendency at the EU level. National policy-makers have to take the distributional consequences of changes in SF policy into consideration. The more that partisan channels transmit these consequences, the more likely it is that policy-makers will take them into consideration.

Stronger subnational entities, such as German or Austrian Länder, have also approached the EU Commission directly [START_REF] Jeffrey | Regional Information Offices in Brussels and Multi-level Governance in the EU: A UK-German Comparison[END_REF]. All German Länder have their own representations in Brussels, which shows that this direct lobbying is seen to be a beneficial investment. The principle of partnership establishes such political communication officially, since the Commission actively seeks to engage with subnational tiers of the political system. As a consequence, lobbying by regions in Brussels has increased (Allen, 2000: 259). Local authorities, and with them partisan actors, not only cooperate with national governments in the planning and monitoring stages, but also intervene in the policy process via a host of formal and informal committees such as the Economic and Financial Committee (ECOFIN), the Council of Regional Ministers and the Committee of Regions and Local Authorities.

These channels allow regional partisan actors to participate in the negotiations between the Commission and the member states. We summarize this discussion in the form of two main hypotheses that link the underlying political space in the European Union with redistributional outcomes in SF policies. The distribution of Structural Funds across regions should correspond to traditional partisan preferences for more or less spending. The causal mechanism for this hypothesis is analogous to that for national political systems. According to their ideologies, parties from the left always prefer higher levels of spending than do parties on the political right. This hypothesis is a typical marginal argument. All else being equal, we expect left-wing parties to receive more SF per capita than right-wing parties. Obviously, any regional government will try to maximize its own revenues. Given their ideological stance, however, left-wing parties should be more capable of doing so since this corresponds to the ideological preferences of their voters [START_REF] Roemer | Political Competition: Theory and Applications[END_REF]. Because SF are the EU's major redistributive tool that is directly comparable to national redistribution, these preferences should be visible in the form of higher levels of SF.

H2: If a pro-EU vs. anti-EU cleavage exists, regions in which Eurosceptic parties are strong will receive more Structural Funds in order to buy the political acquiescence of these voters.

The causal mechanism for the second hypothesis is more complicated. We expect that SF policy does not (only) serve the purpose of enhancing socioeconomic cohesion. We rather think of SF policy as a means of compensating political losers or those who protest against EU integration. If this is the case, it is reasonable to assume that major parties and political actors have to pacify Eurosceptic voters through substantial transfers. A good example is Ireland, which is one of the countries that have received most SF on a per capita basis. Until the mid 1990s, Ireland received up to 5% of national GDP in annual transfers for cohesion and restructuring. Most Irish are in favour of the EUas Eurobarometer data show -but this does not deter them from voting against crucial reforms when national politics overrides EU issues, such as in the case of the Nice Treaty in the referendum of June 2001. In these cases, SF could act as a political compensation for voters' agreement on further steps in European integration. 5 If the institutional critique is correct, both hypotheses depend on the institutional characteristics of national political systems. Hence, it is possible that partisan effects are stronger in federalist political systems where regional actors have more political clout than they do in centralized systems [START_REF] Hooghe | The Politics of European Union Regional Policy[END_REF]. It is also likely that partisan effects are stronger if the same party rules on different levels of government. Given the complexity of the EU's political system, our hypotheses are highly stylized. They are, however, the closest analogy to similar studies done on national redistributive policies. The next section will show how these hypotheses are operationalized.

Descriptive empirics and data

In this section we introduce indicators measuring regional partisanship and the SF received per subnational unit. Given the huge diversity of national political systems in the EU, both variables are difficult to operationalize. We turn first to the partisan variables, for which data from the 1999 elections to the European Parliament are used. To measure SF allocation at the regional level, we use the official data of the EU Commission's financial budgetary planning for the period 2000-6. Here we focus primarily on a short description of how these Funds are allocated across EU regions.

Data on regional partisan cleavages

Measuring the regional distribution of different party families across Europe is a daunting task. Not only are party families in some instances characterized by high internal heterogeneity and temporal instability (see e.g. [START_REF] Hix | Political Parties in the European Union[END_REF], but systems of regional classification also differ widely across Europe. We therefore decided to gather data for the 1999 European Parliamentary election for 116 regions. Using data on EP elections has some advantages over national data, since they reveal the actual voting behaviour at the same point in time for all countries. We computed the vote share of parties for the regional level corresponding to the EU's NUTS classification. 6 For Portugal and Finland we could not match the national administrative system of election statistics with the NUTS classification, and so we had to leave these countries unaccounted for.

Comparing party votes across European regions is naturally problematic. In order to enable a meaningful comparison, we linked each national party to its corresponding party faction in the European Parliament. All in all, there were seven party families represented in the EP between 1999 and 2004. The British Labour Party, for example, is part of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament (PES). For all these parties we report their votes received according to region in national elections and in the European elections, respectively. If two leftist parties in a region were members of the same faction in the EP, we added both percentage votes. With this procedure we have lost the information on individual parties, but we have gained comparability across European regions and elections.

The two variables of major interest are the sizes of left parties and Eurosceptic parties in regional elections (LEFTPAR and ESCEP). We defined the following European party factions as being part of a leftist party family: the Party of European Socialists Group, the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, and the Greens/European Free Alliance Group. The share of Eurosceptic parties contains the regional votes for the following factions: the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, Union for Europe of the Nations, the Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities, the Technical Group of Independent Members, and factionally independent EP members. Note that, according to our coding, the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left is part of both the leftist and the Eurosceptic group. In order to provide an idea of party competition in European regions, we added the Effective Number of Parties (ENP). ENP is a Herfindahl index and is defined as the inverse of the sum of squared party shares. The appendix shows the summary statistics for our variables of interest for the European elections. 7

Data on Structural Funds

Data on SF originate from the DG Budget of the EU Commission and represent the financial perspective of the distribution of SF for the years 2000-6. We extracted information on Funds for Objectives 1 and 2, which are the only fiscal transfers that can be attributed to individual regions. Funds for these two objectives make up roughly 70% of total spending on SF. Unfortunately, the Commission does not report data at the same aggregation level in all countries, but in some instances uses NUTS 1, NUTS 2 or even the national level. This is due to the administrative structure of each member state. Ireland, for instance, counts as a single Objective 1 region, whereas in Germany the beneficiaries are the Länder (NUTS 1). In France, recipients of Objective 1 Funds are the Régions, which correspond to NUTS 2. All together, we gathered information for 83 out of a total 137 European regions that receive Objectives 1 and 2 funding.

SF are officially allocated according to transparent criteria such as, for Objective 1 Funds, the 75% average EU GDP threshold or, for Objective 2 Funds, the status of being an industrial region in decline. SF allocations, however, correlate only weakly with these official indicators. Figure 1 shows the relationship between SF and GDP per capita. We use the sum of per capita Objective 1 and 2 Funds per region and show its relation to GDP per capita at the regional level. 8 Obviously, there is a negative relationship between these two variables, but 'being poor' is neither a strong nor a sufficient predictor of the amount of SF per head a region receives, as the upper-left observations and the outlier of Ireland show. If we were to use other information, such as the per capita level of agricultural funds, we would also not find a particularly strong relationship. There is a trade-off between Structural and Agricultural Fund spending, but regional diversion along this trade-off is high. Our conjecture is that partisan politics explains some of this residual variation.

Testing the hypotheses

This section provides an empirical test for the two partisan hypotheses. We are interested in how far partisan politics shapes the regional allocation of SF in Europe. Therefore the effects of two different sets of variables are explored. First, official economic criteria such as per capita GDP (GDP/CAP) for 'Objective 1' and the unemployment rate (UNEMP) for 'Objective 2' should have an impact on the allocation of SF per capita. In addition, SF should be complementary to Agricultural Funds per capita. Unfortunately, only national shares of agricultural transfers (AGRAR/CAP) are available. Second, we consider the notion that partisan politics also influences the allocation of SF. Our main interest lies in testing the impact of the size of left parties (LEFTPAR) and Eurosceptic parties (ESCEP) on the allocation. We expect both variables to raise regional SF.

Some scholars argue that partisan politics should play a role only where political institutions allow regional actors to be influential [START_REF] Hooghe | The Politics of European Union Regional Policy[END_REF]. We therefore add two indicators as proxies for institutional effects. One is the Effective Number of Parties (ENP). It has been argued that proportional voting systems usually generate more effective political actors than do majoritarian systems, and are therefore biased towards more spending (e.g. [START_REF] Persson | Constitutions and Economic Policy[END_REF]. The reason is that coalition governments are more likely in multi-party systems, and these coalitions are difficult to form without further spending. The second indicator is a proxy for the presence of federalist systems (FED). As outlined earlier, federalist systems grant more influence to subnational actors, which should in turn lead to more spending for these regions. We used a dummy variable from [START_REF] Persson | The Economic Effects of Constitutions[END_REF], where federal systems are coded with 1. We tested our hypotheses with the data set on SF and the results of the 1999 European elections. The previous section showed that these partisan data are a reasonable way of depicting regional-level political cleavages, no matter how 'second order' elections to the EP are supposed to be. Electoral patterns are similar enough to enable meaningful interpretations to be drawn from the European elections. In addition, because of data constraints for national elections, we increase the number of observations by using the European election data. The appendix shows the summary statistics of our variables.

The estimation method is ordinary least squares (OLS) with the logarithm of the SF per capita (log OBJ/CAP) as the dependent variable. Our dependent variable is, however, truncated. Many European regions receive no SF at all, which might lead to biased results if we were to include all observations in our regression and not just those regions receiving SF. A standard remedy for this problem is the use of a Tobit model. As Hug (2003: 263) argues, the truncated regression is preferable if 'important omitted variables influence simultaneously the selection into the incomplete data set and the dependent variable of the outcome equation'. As argued above, it is unlikely that the bargaining processes for selecting regions and distributing SF are the same. In such circumstances, it is difficult to establish whether the Tobit results are always superior to OLS. Ideally, one would use a selection model that explicitly accounts for differences in the selection and distribution stages, but this is beyond the scope of this paper. 9 Therefore we present both OLS and Tobit results in Table 1.

The first model estimates the effects of our main independent variables. We include three variables that depict the official allocation criteria (GDP/CAP [log], UNEMP [log] and AGRAR/CAP [log]) in addition to Federalism (FED) and the Effective Number of Parties (ENP) as control variables. As expected, GDP per capita has a negative and strongly significant impact on the regional allocation of SF. The sign of the coefficient of the unemployment rate (UNEMP) is positive but insignificant. The allocation of Agricultural Funds per capita (AGRAR/CAP) has a positive coefficient, suggesting that beneficiaries of Agricultural Funds also receive more SF. The variable, however, is far from being significant. Our partisan variables confirm our hypotheses. The share of left parties in the European elections at the regional level (LEFTPAR) and the share of Eurosceptic parties (ESCEP) have the expected positive signs and are also significant at the 10% level. Apparently, the strength of left and Eurosceptic parties adds substantial information to the puzzle of SF allocation. Partisan politics also explains the outlier of Ireland in Figure 1, because Ireland has strong Eurosceptic parties. As for our two institutional variables, we see that neither the federalism (FED) nor the multiparty system indicator (ENP) performs particularly well. Since we lack partisan data for some regions, the number of observations amounts to 71 in models 1 to 3. We also tested for correlation between the independent variables but failed to find strong correlations.

Based on the coefficients in model 1 we see that a 1 percentage point increase in the vote share of left parties increases the allocation of SF by 2.9%. An increase in Eurosceptic parties by 1 percentage point increases the regional allocation by as much as 3%. The appendix contains two partial plots for the effects of LEFTPAR and ESCEP in model 1. The visual inspection shows that the partial residuals of LEFTPAR are robust against outliers, whereas ESCEP, though not unreliable, is more sensitive. However, one caveat applies. It is possible that regional voter behaviour might be influenced by the amount of SF a region receives. If this were the case, the causal effect could be reversed.

In fact, [START_REF] Mattila | Why Bother? Determinants of Turnout in the European Elections[END_REF] shows that turnout in European elections is influenced by the EU subsidies a country receives, although this effect is not very strong. If, on the other hand, subsidies had an impact on voter behaviour, we would underestimate rather than overestimate the coefficients of our main independent variables.

We also tested for interaction effects in models 2 and 3. In particular, we test whether the impact of left and Eurosceptic parties on SF allocation is contingent on the degree of federalism. In order to construct our interaction terms LEFTPAR ϫ FED and ESCEP ϫ FED, we re-parameterized the variables by subtracting the means from LEFTPAR, ESCEP and FED before multiplying these variables. This has the advantage that the coefficients of LEFTPAR and ESCEP in models 2 and 3 depict their effects for the mean value of FED. Model 2 shows that including LEFTPAR ϫ FED as interaction term slightly improves the significance and size of the coefficient of LEFTPAR, although the interaction term is insignificant. In model 3, the interaction term ESCEP ϫ FED affects the significance of LEFTPAR and reduces the coefficient and significance of ESCEP. 10 The fourth model is our Tobit estimate. We use SF per capita rather than its logarithm as the dependent variable. All of the 116 European regions for which we have data go into the regression. The Tobit model results show at first glance that all coefficient signs, except for FED, remain stable. Further inspection shows that all t-values stay in a similar range compared with the t-values of model 1, and even with the t-values of the OLS model with the non-logarithm dependent variable (not displayed). Only the effective number of parties (ENP) changes its t-value and significance level compared with model 1. LEFTPAR and ESCEP lose their significance in the Tobit model. We cannot give a definitive answer as to which OLS or Tobit regression better suits the data. The Tobit model corrects for truncated data, whereas our OLS regression fits the skewed distribution better for regions receiving SF, using the dependent variable logarithm. We argue, however, that the explanatory power of our main independent variables, LEFTPAR and ESCEP, applies only to those regions that receive at least some SF. We do not claim that the vote share of Eurosceptic or left parties explains why a region that is not officially eligible does not receive any funding.

Figure 2 shows that there is indeed no correlation between the share of left parties and SF allocation for those regions that are not eligible for funding.

For the eligible regions, however, there is a strong positive correlation. The figure displays the regression line only for the regions receiving SF. We therefore conclude that party politics matters in regions that are eligible for funding. However, the relationship between eligibility for SF and partisan politics is unlikely to be equivalent to the relationship between the distribution of SF and partisan politics. Here, official criteria such as GDP per capita and the unemployment rate would need to be addressed in detail. Moreover, our dependent variable data are not exactly suitable for the Tobit model. Since addressing the selection bias is not without caveats either [START_REF] Bodenstein | Ripples in a Rising Tide: Why Some EU Regions Receive More Structural Funds Than Others[END_REF], there is no clear strategy for which model should be preferred. We therefore regard only the OLS estimates as inferences for those regions that actually qualify as SF regions.

Conclusions

This paper has explored the impact of European partisan politics on the allocation of SF in subnational European regions. There is an ongoing debate about which political actors at different political levels shape European SF policy, and whether this policy field is giving rise to a new mode of European governance. Partisan politics does not play a major role in this literature. At the national level, in contrast, partisan explanations for redistributive preferences are fairly widespread. This insight prompted us to delve deeper into the impact that European party politics has on SF policy, a core European redistributive policy area.

We have argued that partisan politics can influence the allocation of SF in at least two ways. First, regional parties can affect the behaviour of subnational or national governments. If a region is dominated by parties with a high ideological preference for regional policy, regional politicians will lobby for SF harder than will national governments. Second, regional partisan actors can lobby the EU Commission and other European actors directly. To the extent that the EU Commission has discretionary power over the distribution of SF, strong regional actors can try to influence the distribution of these funds directly. Given these two channels, party composition is likely to influence the allocation of SF. Therefore we applied the traditional partisan hypothesis from the literature on national redistribution and have found visible, though not always robust, evidence for a link between partisanship and SF policy at the regional level.

Studies on European distributional policies primarily focus on redistribution between EU member states and assess the role that negotiations in the Council of Ministers play in this process. This paper has shifted the focus to subnational actors, especially in the regions, and has explored the role of parties instead of governments. Thus far, interregional redistribution has rarely been addressed, despite its normative importance in the European Union. If, for instance, interregional redistribution is really driven by political or institutional factors, this may be one reason Structural Funds have proved ineffective in economic terms (e.g. [START_REF] Boeri | Who's Afraid of the Big Enlargement? Economic and Social Implications of the European Union's Prospective Eastern Expansion[END_REF]. This implies that the abolition of Structural Funds, as suggested by some economists, would lead to serious political problems in particularly sensitive regions.

Notes

We would like to thank Thomas Plümper, Gerald Schneider, Philipp Mohl and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments.

1 A further complication is that the Commission deals with a diverse set of subnational actors. National governments select subnational partners, with the result that the implementation of the partner principle varies across EU member states (e.g. [START_REF] Sutcliffe | The 1999 Reform of the Structural Fund Regulations: Multi-level Governance or Renationalization?[END_REF].

2 A further caveat is that European issues are of low political salience. Elections for the European Parliament (EP) are generally considered to be secondorder competitions [START_REF] Reif | National Electoral Cycles and European Elections 1979 and 1984[END_REF]. We address this issue in the empirical section of the paper. 3 For the financial period 2000-6, the decision procedure follows Council Regulation (EC) 1260/1999 of 21 June 1999. 4 Although the EP has gained in importance through the Amsterdam Treaty, its discretionary power to change the list of regions or transfers to specific regions is limited [START_REF] Heinelt | Die Entwicklung der EU-Strukturfonds als kumulativer Politikprozess[END_REF]. It can, however, lobby the Council and the Commission in the name of regional interests in the wake of important summits. 5 [START_REF] Mattila | Why Bother? Determinants of Turnout in the European Elections[END_REF], for instance, finds that voter turnout in EP elections responds positively to the size of the EU transfers a country receives. 6 The NUTS classification (Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques)

is the standardized classification of subnational unities in the European Union. It distinguishes between three hierarchical regional levels, which do not necessarily coincide with real administrative units. 7 We have compared our regional election data for the EP with the respective regional election data for national elections preceding the EP 1999 elections [START_REF] Caramani | Elections in Western Europe since 1815: Electoral Results by Constituencies[END_REF]. T-tests for the variables of both elections show that the differences are marginal. Even though EP elections are less salient politically, this does not affect the regional variation in partisan cleavages. We conclude that data from the EP elections are suitable for our purpose. Both our data set and the appendix are available on the EUP homepage (http://www. uni-konstanz.de/eup/issues.htm). 8 We could not include spending on Objective 3, since the EU Commission does not provide the necessary information for the regional level. Its overall importance is, however, marginal compared with Objectives 1 and 2. 9 An alternative model to control for selection bias would be a Heckman selection model. However, this necessitates a thorough understanding of what drives the process of granting a region the status of an SF beneficiary in general. Since we lack a theory for this selection process, we refrain from using the Heckman model. 10 We have also experimented with further interactions. There is a weak incidence that the party system and the congruence between national and European elections enhance the partisan effects. Results are available on request.

H1:

  Regions in which parties on the left of the spectrum are strong should receive more Structural Funds than other regions.

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1 Regional distribution of Structural Funds and GDP per capita.

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 Vote share of left parties and Structural Funds per capita.

Table 1

 1 Regression results for Structural Funds and partisan politics

		Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4
		OLS	OLS	OLS	Tobit model
	Constant	33.758***	35.065***	31.089***	9745.255**
		5.96	(6.2)	(5.21)	(3.34)
	GDP/CAP (log)	-3.074***	-3.232***	-2.862***	-1032.7***
		(-6.01)	(-6.28)	(-5.39)	(-3.91)
	UNEMP (log)	0.21	0.077	0.367	294.006*
		(0.85)	(0.3)	(1.35)	(2.27)
	AGRAR/CAP (log)	0.009	0.114	0.089	143.463
		(0.03)	(0.37)	(0.29)	(0.9)
	LEFTPAR	2.949*	3.097**	2.394	151.122
		(2.57)	(2.72)	(1.98)	(0.27)
	ESCEP	3.061*	2.827*	2.392	107.54
		(2.55)	(2.37)	(1.86)	(0.2)
	FED	-0.47	-0.556*	-0.261	197.49
		(-1.8)	(-2.11)	(-0.86)	(1.57)
	ENP	-0.106	-0.104	-0.063	-219.248***
		(-0.77)	(-0.76)	(-0.45)	(-3.89)
	LEFTPAR ϫ FED		3.884
			(0.114)
	ESCEP ϫ FED			2.813
				(1.36)
	N (censored)	71	71	71	116 (71)
	Adj. R 2	0.7301	0.7367	0.7337
	F-test	28.06***	25.49***	25.11***
	LR Chi 2				87.28***
	Log likelihood				-567.971
	Pseudo R 2				0.0714
	Notes: t-values in parentheses; *significant at 10%; **significant at 5%; ***significant at 1%.

European Union Politics 7(3)

Kemmerling and Bodenstein Partisan Politics in Regional Redistribution

About the authors


Mikko Mattila

Tapio Raunio

Cautious Voters -Supportive Parties Opinion Congruence between Voters and Parties on the EU Dimension

This article analyses party-voter congruence on European integration matters in the EU member states. Drawing on existing research, we put forward eight hypotheses which are tested with data from the EES2004 survey. We show that parties are closer to their voters on the left/right dimension than on the EU dimension. Parties are also more supportive of European integration than are their voters. Party system characteristics (number of parties, ideological range) did not affect opinion congruence. The responsiveness analysis at the party level shows that government parties were less responsive than opposition parties; party size was related to responsiveness, with opinion congruence higher in smaller parties; and responsiveness was lower among centrist parties. Voters are also better represented on the EU dimension by their parties in the new than in the older EU member states. This difference may result from the EU occupying a more central place on the political agendas of the new member states.

Introduction

Representation is both a complex and a contested phenomenon. It is complex in the sense that it can be approached from a variety of angles, with most of the empirical research focusing on the linkages between the representatives (such as members of parliament and political parties) and those who elect them. It is contested in the sense that there is no commonly accepted normative rule or objective criterion for assessing whether representation works or not.

Nonetheless, students of representative democracy do agree on certain basic conditions that a political system should meet. First, the composition of the representative body (primarily the legislature) should reflect the composition of the electorate, thus ensuring that all main societal groups are represented in public policy-making. Secondly, there should be at least some congruence of preferences between the citizens and their representatives. Although there is no consensus on what constitutes a sufficiently high level of such opinion agreement, it is easy to agree with Wessels (1999: 137), who states that 'the smallest common denominator in normative terms, though, is that in a democracy there should be some match between the interests of the people and what representatives promote'.

Considering the dominance of the left/right cleavage in European politics [START_REF] Huber | Expert Interpretations of Party Space and Party Locations in 42 Societies[END_REF], it is not surprising that most studies find political parties to be quite representative of their voters on this dimension. However, any new dimension or issue that enters the political agenda, particularly if that issue is only weakly related to the left/right dimension, is bound to cause problems for parties. The main such new dimension in European politics is undoubtedly the development of the European Union (EU). Indeed, several scholars have argued that the European party-political space, at least in those countries that joined the Union before 2004, is nowadays based on two main dimensions -the old left/right cleavage and the new EU cleavage, often defined as an anti/pro-European integration dimension (e.g. [START_REF] Hix | Dimensions and Alignments in European Union Politics: Cognitive Constraints and Partisan Responses[END_REF][START_REF] Hooghe | The Making of a Polity: The Struggle over European Integration[END_REF][START_REF] Marks | National Parties and the Contestation of Europe[END_REF]Marks andSteenbergen, 2002b, 2004;[START_REF] Mattila | Contested Decisions: Empirical Analysis of Voting in the European Council of Ministers[END_REF]. One of the key arguments of this research is that the low connectedness between these two dimensions creates problems for the established political parties, which hence have an incentive to downplay European issues and to structure competition along the more familiar and thus safer socioeconomic cleavage.

Comparing voters' own policy positions with their assessment of the position of the party they voted for, this article analyses the congruence of preferences between political parties and their voters on European integration in 22 EU member countries. More specifically, we are not just interested in reporting levels of issue agreement; the main aim is to find explanations for the variation between the individual countries and parties. The article is structured as follows. The next section presents the findings of existing research on policy representation and on the impact of the EU on the party systems of its member states. Drawing on these two strands of research, we introduce the research hypotheses and data, followed by the empirical analysis. The concluding discussion summarizes our findings.

Policy representation and European integration

Representative democracy is based on the concepts of delegation and accountability. The main act of delegation is that of the voters casting their vote in an election, with the elected representatives then held accountable for their actions in the next election. When choosing their party and/or candidate in the election, voters presumably have at least some knowledge of the preferences of the parties competing in the election. Indeed, according to the socalled party government or 'responsible party model', which has driven much of the policy representation research in the European context (Powell, 2004: 284), cohesive parties should offer competing choices to the voters, who then vote for the party that is closest to their preferences. Once in office, parties will carry out the promises made in the campaign, and hence eventual government policy will be in line with the preferences of the majority of the electorate [START_REF] Thomassen | Empirical Research into Political Representation: Failing Democracy or Failing Models?[END_REF]. Whether these conditions are met is obviously an empirical matter.

Policy representation is a crucial aspect of the act of delegation in the responsible party model. Not only should parties offer competing policy bundles to the voters, but voters should be aware of these differences and then choose their party accordingly. Because European party systems are based on the left/right dimension, it is likely that citizens' most accurate knowledge is about the parties' positions on that dimension, and that, the further one moves from traditional socioeconomic questions, the less informed voters are about party positions and the less representative parties are of their supporters [START_REF] Thomassen | Empirical Research into Political Representation: Failing Democracy or Failing Models?[END_REF]. According to Kitschelt (2000: 851), political parties stick to the established patterns of competition and reduce the dimensionality of the political discourse for at least two reasons:

First, in representative democracy, . . . representatives are charged with representing their constituencies over an infinite and uncertain range of issues. Thus, to enable voters to anticipate candidate positions on issues in which voters do not know the parties' positions or in which parties do not (yet) have positions, parties . . . signal to voters more fundamental principles for generating policy stances that would apply to new and ex ante unforeseeable political issue conflicts. Second, voters are information misers and typically lack time and resources to review the candidates' and parties' specific issue positions. Instead, they are looking for simple underlying principles according to which parties generate issue stances.

Thus the dominance of the left/right dimension, the familiarity of that dimension among voters, and parties' own strategic interests all contribute to attention in European politics focusing on socioeconomic matters. Hence it is not surprising that research on policy representation has found European political parties to be fairly representative of their voters on the left/right dimension. Both comparative analyses and country studies testify that, by and large, European citizens are well represented on that key dimension of party competition (e.g. [START_REF] Dalton | Political Parties and Political Representation: Party Supporters and Party Elites in Nine Nations[END_REF][START_REF] Klingemann | Party Positions and Voter Orientations[END_REF][START_REF] Widfeldt | Party Membership and Party Representativeness[END_REF][START_REF] Thomassen | Empirical Research into Political Representation: Failing Democracy or Failing Models?[END_REF]Schmitt, 1997, 1999a;[START_REF] Kitschelt | Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation[END_REF][START_REF] Pierce | Mass-Elite Issue Linkages and the Responsible Party Model of Representation[END_REF][START_REF] Holmberg | Issue Agreement[END_REF]. 1 It is easy to concur with Kitschelt (2000: 845) who argues that 'it is a key task for political scientists to identify the conditions under which politicians are responsive to citizens' preferences'. However, there appears to be no consensus on which factors work for and against effective policy representation in left/right matters. The only broader study that focuses exclusively on comparing policy representation in different countries is [START_REF] Miller | Policy Representation in Western Democracies[END_REF], which employs largely comparable elite and citizen data from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. Interestingly, the authors of that book reach quite divergent conclusions. [START_REF] Wessels | System Characteristics Matter: Empirical Evidence from Ten Representation Studies[END_REF] did find a link between party system features and policy representation, with the median voter better represented in countries with majoritarian electoral systems, and party voters better represented in countries with proportional representation (PR) election systems. Wessels (1999: 153) also concluded that 'the stronger the polarization -the more differentiated the supply -the better the match between party voters and MPs of that party'.

However, Holmberg (1999: 94) reached a different conclusion:

Given the differences in measurement techniques and measurement scales and the very limited number of issues included in some studies, the conservative conclusion is that the degree of collective policy congruence between elected leaders and voters did not differ in any substantial way between the five political systems . . . [T]he political system does not matter when it comes to degrees of policy congruence between leaders and voters in Western democracies. Pierce (1999: 31) also found no connection between the fragmentation of the party system and the effectiveness of policy representation.

With data from Eurobarometers and from a survey of MEP candidates carried out in 1979, [START_REF] Dalton | Political Parties and Political Representation: Party Supporters and Party Elites in Nine Nations[END_REF] compared policy congruence in the then nine European Community countries. At the system level, Dalton found that PR electoral systems and higher party diversity (operationalized as the number of parties in parliament and the fractionalization of the legislature) produced better issue agreement: 'As the number and variety of parties increases, it becomes easier for voters to locate a party that simultaneously represents their views on all issue dimensions' (Dalton, 1985: 287). At the party level, Dalton showed that parties on the right and, particularly, on the left (as opposed to being centrist) had better opinion congruence, and that having a centralized party organization also facilitated issue agreement. Comparing issue congruence on the left/right dimension between the median voter and the government in 12 industrialized countries, [START_REF] Huber | Congruence between Citizens and Policymakers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy[END_REF] showed that congruence increased when the effective number of parties and the proportionality of election outcomes also increased.

However, the reality is altogether different when we examine attitudes towards European integration, which arguably has become the second main cleavage in European politics. Recently an increasing number of studies has focused on the role of parties in the EU system. Perhaps the most significant finding of this research is the divisive nature of the European question. Regardless of the data used -voting behaviour in legislatures, surveys of citizens and MPs, expert surveys, or more descriptive approaches -European integration is clearly a destabilizing factor for national parties.

Although European questions have led to severe conflicts among and within parties in several EU countries, European integration has nonetheless not altered the basic structure of national party systems by resulting in the formation of new parties [START_REF] Mair | The Limited Impact of Europe on National Party Systems[END_REF]. This is not surprising. Indeed, there are very strong reasons to expect that we would not witness the entry of new parties as a result of European integration. The main explanatory factor for the observed stability is that the established national parties have an interest in sustaining the status quo and the prevailing structures of party competition. After all, despite the gradual partisan de-alignment, parties still have their 'natural' pools of voters and they have reputations for particular programmes and policy objectives. Giving the EU dimension a stronger role in the competition for votes would potentially lead to instability that might weaken the role of the main national parties (Marks and Steenbergen, 2002a: 881-2). As Hooghe et al. (2002: 970)

argue:

Parties that are successful in the existing structure of contestation have little incentive to rock the boat, while unsuccessful parties, that is, parties with weak electoral support or those that are locked out of government, have an interest in restructuring competition. The same strategic logic that leads mainstream parties to assimilate the issues raised by European integration into the Left/Right dimension of party competition leads peripheral parties to exploit European integration in an effort to shake up the party system.

Viewed from the perspective of the responsible party model, mainstream parties are thus offering competing choices to voters in left/right matters but not in European questions.

Whereas studies have shown parties to be fairly representative of their voters on the left/right dimension, the picture is much bleaker in European matters. First, parties are ideologically less cohesive on integration than on traditional left/right issues (e.g. [START_REF] Hix | Dimensions and Alignments in European Union Politics: Cognitive Constraints and Partisan Responses[END_REF][START_REF] Ray | Measuring Party Orientations towards European Integration: Results from an Expert Survey[END_REF]Thomassen and Schmitt, 1999b). Moreover, within parties the elected representatives are considerably more supportive of integration than are their voters, with the European dimension revealing a wide gap between citizens and MPs. The first comparative study on issue agreement on integration matters did, however, find considerable congruence of opinion. Comparing voters' perceptions of where parties stand and voters' own preferences from a survey carried out right after the 1989 EP elections, Van der Eijk and Franklin (1991: 124) showed that most parties were representative of their voters on integration matters, with 'only a few parties' taking positions that were clearly out of line with the position of their voters.

Comparing the preferences of citizens and candidates in the 1994 EP elections on concrete policy issues concerning the EU (abolition of borders, unemployment, single currency), Thomassen and Schmitt (1997: 181) concluded that the elite and the electorate were 'living in different European worlds'. And, when comparing the views of MPs, MEPs and citizens on those issues, the authors stated a couple of years later that, 'across the board, voters' attitudes appeared to be less pro-European than those of the political elites, whether they were members of the European Parliament or of the national parliaments' (Thomassen and Schmitt, 1999a: 206). Using the same data, [START_REF] Marsh | Territorial Representation[END_REF] showed that MEPs from countries with highly proportional electoral systems were more likely to represent citizens better than were MEPs from countries with less proportional systems.

In another article, based on elite and citizen survey data from 1979 and 1994, [START_REF] Schmitt | Dynamic Representation: The Case of European Integration[END_REF] showed that, although the policy preferences of the voters and the parties did diverge, issue agreement between voters and party elites about the general development of integration ('are you for or against efforts being made to unify Europe?') was as high as on the left/right dimension. Thus they argued that, whereas policy representation may be failing on specific EU policy issues, it does seem to work fairly well as far as the overall development of integration is concerned. Finally, using data from the 1999 European Election Study (EES), in which voters were asked to place both themselves and the parties on the anti/pro-integration dimension, [START_REF] Van Der Eijk | Potential for Contestation on European Matters at National Elections in Europe[END_REF] showed that the diversity of opinion among the electorate was not reflected at the level of the parties. There was thus, according to those authors, 'potential for contestation' on EU matters, with the EU issue being a 'sleeping giant' in European politics. The study also showed the parties to be far more supportive of integration than were the voters.

Most of these previous studies on policy representation in EU matters have basically just reported the preferences or positions of voters and parties. Only a few of them have gone beyond descriptive analysis. Our study constitutes an attempt at explaining variation in levels of issue agreement both between countries and between individual political parties. Moreover, the existing body of research on policy representation has produced somewhat contradictory findings, with no consensus on what explains variation between individual countries or parties. Drawing partly on that previous research, we shall introduce our research hypotheses in the next section.

Research hypotheses

The primary goal of this article is to explain variation in party-voter congruence on European integration in the EU member states. Our analysis proceeds in three stages. First, we compare opinion congruence on the EU dimension with congruence levels on the left/right dimension. Next, we examine representativeness at the system level by comparing the responsiveness of party systems in the different EU countries. Then, we shall change our focus to the party level, and explain variation between individual parties.

In line with this approach, our research hypotheses are also broken down into three categories. First we put forward two hypotheses relating to political dimensions. Because previous research indicates that elites are more supportive of integration than are citizens, we expect to find that in 2004 too the parties were more pro-integrationist than were their voters (Hypothesis 1). We also expect, again in line with the findings of previous research, opinion congruence to be higher on the left/right dimension than on the anti/pro-integration dimension (H2).

Moving next to explaining variation between individual countries (the system level), we test the impact of three factors. Party system characteristics have been argued by several authors to affect the effectiveness of policy representation. Although previous studies have produced mixed findings, they seem to lean towards arguing that greater party system fragmentation improves the congruence of opinion between the masses and the elites (e.g. [START_REF] Wessels | System Characteristics Matter: Empirical Evidence from Ten Representation Studies[END_REF]. Hence we also hypothesize that the more fragmented the party system, the greater the congruence of opinions between voters and parties (H3). The idea is simply that a larger number of competing parties means voters have more options to find their 'own' party in the elections. Of course, it is quite possible that parties decide to compete in the election on policy dimensions other than the EU dimension, but this is a question for empirical analysis.

Our second system-level variable is ideological range, sometimes also called wing party distance [START_REF] Gilljam | Mapping the Nordic Party Space[END_REF], operationalized as the distance on both the left/right and the EU dimensions between the most left-wing and the most right-wing or the most anti-EU and the most pro-EU party in the country. According to this hypothesis, greater ideological range will produce better representativeness (H4), as parties offer more policy options to voters.

Our final system-level hypothesis is not derived from previous research on policy representation, and focuses more specifically on European integration. We expect that the timing of membership matters, with lower congruence on EU matters in the new member states that joined the Union in the spring of 2004 (H5), just under two months before the survey, from which our data are taken, was carried out. The reason for this expectation is that, in these newly democratized member countries, European questions are new to the parties and to the voters, and therefore parties have had less time to adopt positions on integration and there has been less time for parties and their supporters to 'find each other' in EU matters. Another factor that speaks on behalf of this hypothesis is that stable party systems should produce higher opinion congruence [START_REF] Holmberg | Collective Policy Congruence Compared[END_REF], with the newly democratized post-communist countries still characterized by much higher party system instability than the older EU member states. However, a valid counter-argument is that, because the June 2004 EP elections took place so soon after EU membership referenda, the higher salience of European integration on the political agendas of these countries may have produced better congruence between parties and their voters.

Turning to the explanation of variation between individual parties, we put forward three hypotheses. We expect government status to make a difference, with the level of congruence depending on whether or not a party is in the government. We argue that government membership makes parties less representative of their voters (H6), the logic being that participation in government, particularly the bargaining involved in multi-party coalitions, distances parties from their voters. Additionally, government parties represent their country at the EU level in the Council and the European Council, and this may present them with further restrictions.

Our second party-level variable is party size. We expect representativeness to be higher in small parties than in large parties (H7). The rationale is simple: small parties are likely to be ideologically more homogeneous than are larger parties, which necessarily have bigger and thus more heterogeneous electorates, hence ending up with lower party-voter congruence than small niche parties have.

The final party-level variable tests the impact of party ideology. This variable is derived from [START_REF] Dalton | Political Parties and Political Representation: Party Supporters and Party Elites in Nine Nations[END_REF], according to whom ideological centrism had a negative effect on policy representation. Hence we also expect that ideological centrism produces lower congruence, with parties that are further from the political centre on the left/right dimension being more representative of their voters (H8). The rationale behind this hypothesis is that parties that are situated on the left or the right have clearer policy profiles than have centrist parties, with this ideological clarity facilitating higher responsiveness.

Data

Our data are taken from the European Election Study 2004 (EES2004) project, which consisted (for the most part) of identical surveys carried out in the EU countries just after the European Parliament elections held in June. Unfortunately, not all countries were included in the survey, and hence our data set covers only 22 political systems. 2 Of these political systems, 21 are EU member states; additionally we have data from Northern Ireland, in which a separate survey was conducted because Northern Ireland has its own unique party system different from the rest of the United Kingdom. Although Northern Ireland is not an EU member state, for the sake of simplicity we will refer to our 22 political systems as member states or as member countries in the text.

We use questionnaire data for locating both the parties and their voters on the anti/pro-integration dimension and on the left/right dimension. Hence our approach differs from the majority of previous studies on policy representation that have compared voter data with elite-level data (mainly surveys of MPs or MEPs). Of the studies dealing with policy representation in EU matters, only [START_REF] Van Der Eijk | European Community Politics and Electoral Representation: Evidence from the 1989 European Elections Study[END_REF] relied exclusively on voter data as we do here.

We compare voters' own policy positions with their assessment of the position of the party they voted for. Basically, we assume that when the distance between voters and their party is small, parties do a good job of representing their voters and vice versa. For each party we calculated two measures. First, using only the respondents who indicated that they voted for a particular party in the 2004 EP elections, we calculated their average positions on the EU and left/right dimensions. Second, we calculated from the same respondents where they perceived their 'own' party to stand on these dimensions. Comparing the resulting two average values, it is possible to analyse how close or far voters feel that their parties are to themselves. In order to avoid a situation where our results are dominated by a large number of small parties that even collectively obtain just a fraction of the vote, we weigh the observations by the parties' share of the votes in the 2004 EP elections in the empirical analysis.

We acknowledge that voter perceptions of party locations may not be accurate reflections of reality, with the majority of European citizens probably having quite limited information or knowledge of party policies, at least concerning European integration. More specifically, voters may be engaging in wishful thinking, projecting their own preferences onto their preferred parties. If this is indeed the case, then our data systematically underestimate the distances between parties and their voters. However, it is important to emphasize that, although voters may not be able to place parties accurately on political dimensions, they are likely to base their vote choices on their own perceptions of party and/or candidate positions. Other approaches to inferring parties' positions, such as expert surveys and content analysis of party programmes [START_REF] Mair | Searching for the Positions of Political Actors: A Review of Approaches and a Critical Evaluation of Expert Surveys[END_REF] or using elite data, do not allow us directly to compare the positions of voters and their perceptions of where the parties stand.

The main interest in this article is the distance between voters and their parties on the EU dimension, which was operationalized in the EES2004 questionnaire as a 1-10 scale measuring respondents' attitudes towards European unification. The exact wording of the question was: 'Some say European unification should be pushed further. Others say it already has gone too far. What is your opinion? Please indicate your views using a 10-point scale. On this scale, 1 means unification "has already gone too far" and 10 means it "should be pushed further". What number on this scale best describes your position?' This question was followed by several questions where the respondents were asked to indicate, using the same scale, where the main parties of their respective countries were located. In the following, we refer to this dimension as the anti/pro-EU dimension or simply as the EU dimension.

In addition, and in order to put our results into perspective, we compare policy representation on the EU dimension with representativeness on the conventional left/right dimension. Measures from this dimension are based on the following question: 'In political matters people talk of "the left" and "the right". What is your position? Please indicate your views using any number on a 10-point scale. On this scale, where 1 means "left" and 10 means "right", which number best describes your position?' As with the EU question, this question was followed by a set of questions in which respondents were asked to indicate the positions of the main parties in their country on the left/right scale according to their perception.

Our data set comprises 122 parties from 22 political systems (79 from the old and 43 from the new member states). In the case of some smaller parties, only a handful of respondents voted for them. In this study, only parties with 10 or more voters among the respondents are included to avoid calculating policy position averages from a very small group of voters. This restriction means that some small parties are dropped from the analysis. Furthermore, a much more severe restriction on the inclusion of some parties is caused by the system of joint lists in several member states. In some countries, the respondents voted for lists that included two or more parties, and hence the data do not reveal which particular party they supported. These parties also had to be dropped from the analysis. For example, in Portugal the joint list of two parties, the Social Democrats (PSD) and the People's Party (PP), gained 35% of the votes in the 2004 EP elections. However, from the questionnaire data we know only that some respondents voted for the PSD-PP list but not which of the two parties they supported. Hence, these two parties cannot be included in the data set and as a result we were able to include only three parties from Portugal in our study. Fortunately, for most of the countries we were able to include all or, at least, most of the major parties (see the appendix for more information). 3 Put together, the parties included in our analysis won on average over 84% of the votes in the 2004 European elections. In many countries, such as Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany and Greece, they won over 90% of the votes.

There are several ways of measuring the representativeness of individual politicians or political parties (see [START_REF] Achen | Measuring Representation[END_REF]. We begin our analysis with two very simple measures. First, we analyse the distance between the average position of party voters and the position of their party on the EU and left/right dimensions. This distance measure does not tell us anything about the direction of possible differences between parties and their voters -for example, whether parties have adopted more favourable positions towards European integration than have their voters. The second measure, called 'bias', is simply the difference between the party position and the voter position. Positive values of this measure indicate that parties have more prointegration stances than their voters on the EU dimension or that they have more rightist views on the left/right dimension, whereas negative values indicate the opposite.

Analysis of political dimensions

Distance and bias averages for the 22 political systems are presented in Table 1. The second and third columns of the table show how close or far an average party is located from its voters on the EU and left/right dimensions. On the EU dimension, parties in Northern Ireland are closest to their voters.

The average distance between a party and its voters in Northern Ireland is only 0.1 on the 10-point EU scale, which means that parties are indeed very close to their voters. On the left/right dimension, too, Northern Irish parties seem to be close to their voters. This is quite surprising because the traditional left/right dimension and the EU dimension are hardly defining political cleavages in Northern Irish politics.

Other countries where parties are located very close to their voters on the EU dimension are Cyprus and the Czech Republic. On the EU dimension, the biggest gap between parties and voters can be found in Great Britain, where the average distance is more than 10 times bigger than in Northern Ireland. One would be tempted to say that this is related to the British majoritarian political system, but this is clearly not the case because distances are also large in some countries with proportional electoral systems, such as Finland and Austria.

When looking at the average distance measures in the bottom panel of Table 1, one can see that parties are closer to their voters on the left/right dimension than they are on the EU dimension, which supports our second hypothesis. Similar conclusions can be reached when one compares the distances in the old and in the new EU member states. Basically, parties in the new member states are as close to their voters as are parties in the old member states on both dimensions. The small differences in the actual figures are not statistically significant. Thus, our hypothesis (H5) expecting better representation in the old than in the new member states on the EU dimension is not supported in this initial analysis.

Turning to the bias measures, shown in the last two columns of Table 1, it can be seen that parties are indeed more favourable to European integration than are their voters, as our first hypothesis expected. On the EU dimension, positive figures mean that parties have adopted more pro-EU positions than their voters. Only in the Czech Republic and Poland are voters on average more favourable to European integration than are the parties they voted for. However, the figures for these two countries are very small, indicating that the anti-Europe bias among parties is practically non-existent. The biggest differences between parties and their voters are found in Great Britain, Hungary, Luxembourg and Finland.

The pro-European integration bias among parties can be seen both in the new and in the old member states. However, the average bias seems to be bigger in the old member states (0.77) than in the new (0.56), but the difference is not statistically significant. The bias on the left/right dimension is considerably less than the bias on the EU dimension, indicating, again, that parties represent their voters better on the left/right dimension than on the EU dimension.

System-level analysis

In Table 2 the relationship between political system characteristics and representativeness on both the EU and left/right dimensions is analysed with regression analysis. The distance and bias figures are from Table 1. According to our hypotheses (H3-H5), the number of parties, the ideological range they represent and whether the country is a new/old member state would have an impact on representativeness. The number of parties is measured with the Laakso-Taagepera (1979) index of effective parties (calculated from the distribution of seats in national parliaments at the time of the elections). The ideological range, i.e. the distance between the extreme parties, is measured both on the EU and on the left/right dimensions using the EES2004 data set.

The results in Table 2 are rather disappointing. Most of the regression coefficients are small, with only one being statistically significant and even its sign is contrary to what we hypothesized. We expected greater ideological range to make parties more representative of their voters on the EU dimension, but the positive coefficient seems to indicate that, in party systems with large wing party distance, parties are further away from their voters than they are in countries with less ideological breadth. All in all, none of our three political system-level hypotheses gained support in the empirical analysis.

Party-level analysis

Next we turn to analysing voter-party opinion congruence at party level using [START_REF] Achen | Measuring Representation[END_REF] regression-based approach, which he calls the responsiveness measure of representation. This approach has already been used, e.g. by [START_REF] Dalton | Political Parties and Political Representation: Party Supporters and Party Elites in Nine Nations[END_REF], [START_REF] Herrera | Public Opinion and Congressional Representation[END_REF], [START_REF] Wessels | System Characteristics Matter: Empirical Evidence from Ten Representation Studies[END_REF] and Kitschelt et al. (1999). The basic idea behind the responsiveness approach is that, the better we are able to predict party positions on policy or issue dimensions using party voter positions on these same dimensions, the better the responsiveness. This can be expressed as a regression equation as follows (see Dalton, 1985: 281):

Party position = a + b(voter position)
The degree of overall party responsiveness is determined by both the intercept, a, and the regression coefficient, b, of the model.

According to this perspective of political representation, ideal responsiveness occurs when the intercept of the regression line is 0 and the slope coefficient is 1. This means that, for example, if the party voter average on the EU dimension is 7, the position of their party is also 7. If the average party voter is located at 2, so will the party be, and so on. Different combinations of a and b correspond to different types of deviation from ideal responsiveness. If both b and a equal 1, parties have a positive bias in the policy positions, meaning that they are on the average located 1 point 'to the right' on the dimension. For example, if parties adopt more pro-European integration positions than their voters, as our first hypothesis expected, we will see positive intercepts in our regression models.

It is not only the intercept that affects the degree of responsiveness. The regression coefficient b also has an interesting interpretation. When b is less than 1, parties adopt more convergent positions than their voters do, that is, the opinion differences between parties are smaller than the opinion differences between their supporters. On the other hand, if b is greater than 1, the party system is more polarized and parties accentuate the differences between voters. This means that, at both ends of the policy dimension, parties adopt more extreme positions than their voters do. 4 Table 3 presents the results of the responsiveness analyses (Model A) for all parties in the data set and then separately for parties in the old and in the new member states. Next, we included some additional variables in the analyses (Model B) to see how they affect party responsiveness. These new variables are related to our last three hypotheses, which concerned the effects of government participation (H6), size of the party (H7) and ideological centrism (H8) on representativeness. Government participation is measured with a dummy variable, coded 1 if the party was in government at the time of the 2004 EP elections and 0 if it was in opposition. The size of the party is measured as the vote share it gained in the same elections. Finally, ideological centrism (or extremism) on the left/right dimension is measured with two dummy variables that indicate whether the party was a left-wing or a rightwing party, where the reference category is a centrist party. 5 Examining the results of the responsiveness analysis (Model A) containing all parties in Table 3, we see that European parties deviate from the ideal model of responsiveness in a statistically significant way. The intercept of the model is 1.65, indicating that parties are, according to voter perceptions, more favourable to European integration than their supporters are. Moreover, the slope coefficient (0.83) is less than 1, showing that the variation among parties on the EU dimension is smaller than among their voters. Basically, this confirms the results obtained by [START_REF] Van Der Eijk | Potential for Contestation on European Matters at National Elections in Europe[END_REF] using data from the 1999 EP elections, who concluded that European parties do not differentiate themselves clearly enough on EU matters to offer competing alternatives to voters.

When the new and old member states are compared, interesting results emerge. In the case of parties from the old member countries, the pro-Europe bias is even clearer, over 2 points on the 10-point scale. In addition, the slope coefficient is smaller (0.75), indicating smaller variation among parties than among their voters. However, the case is definitely different in the new member states, where the voter-party opinion congruence corresponds -------------------------- almost exactly to the ideal responsiveness situation, a result that certainly refutes our fifth hypothesis. Clearly parties in the new member states do a better job of representing their voters in EU matters than do parties in the old member states. Perhaps EU matters occupied a larger role on the political agendas of the new member states at the time of the EES survey, with the enlargement (and the preceding membership referenda) taking place only shortly before the 2004 EP elections. This stronger salience of EU matters may have forced parties to be more responsive towards their voters than was the case in the old member states, where parties have mostly been trying to avoid making EU matters a central component of their electoral campaigns or discourse (see, e.g., [START_REF] Van Der Eijk | Potential for Contestation on European Matters at National Elections in Europe[END_REF]. Model B in Table 3 shows how our additional variables are related to responsiveness. Government parties both in the new and in the old member countries occupy more positive positions towards European unification than do opposition parties. This may be related to the fact that government parties often have to make compromises that may distance them from their voters. These compromises are made with their government partners and, perhaps more importantly, at the EU level with other European governments and EU institutions. Opposition parties do not face similar restrictions.

Party size too is related to responsiveness, with larger parties being, on average, further away from their voters on the EU dimension than their smaller counterparts. This effect can be seen both in the old and in the new member states. Perhaps the catch-all nature of most of the larger parties, with broad and diverse supporter bases, enables them to avoid strong dependence on any specific group of voters (Dalton, 1985: 289).

Finally, we can see that ideological extremity on the left/right dimension has an effect on responsiveness. In the regression analysis containing all the parties, the left-wing dummy has a negative coefficient, showing a smaller pro-Europe bias among these parties than among centrist and right-wing parties. Again, the differences between the old and the new member states are small: the coefficients are by and large similar in size to those of the new member states. All in all, these results give at least tentative support to our last hypothesis, which expects a smaller bias in responsiveness among parties that have clearer ideological profiles than among catch-all centrist parties. According to our analysis, this applies particularly to left-wing parties.

Figure 1 depicts the results in graphical form, both in the new and in the old member states. These illustrations are based on predicted values for various types of party using the results from Table 3. When depicting the results for different types of party, it is assumed that independent variables other than the one under consideration at the time take on their average values. Furthermore, in the figures 'large party' denotes a party with 40% support whereas 'small party' denotes a party with 5% electoral support. The dotted lines depict the situation where the ideal party responsiveness is realized: parties and their supporters occupy the same location on the EU dimension. From Figure 1 it is easy to see that voters in the new member states perceive that they are rather well represented by their parties. This is especially the case with small parties, opposition parties and left-wing parties. The situation is very different in the older member states, where a notable difference between pro-EU and anti-EU voters exists. Voters who are supportive of the EU perceive their parties' positions on the EU dimension to be on the average close to their own positions. The situation is worse for voters who have more reserved positions towards the EU. These people feel that their parties do not reflect their EU attitudes. The stronger the voters' anti-EU positions are, the further away from their own parties they feel they are located on EU matters. Thus, the problems of party responsiveness in the old member states are manifested among the EU sceptical voters, not among EU supporters.

Conclusions

The main objective of this article has been to analyse variation in party-voter congruence on European integration in the EU member states. In fact, because previous research had largely focused on merely reporting the positions of parties and voters, this study has constituted one of the first attempts at explaining variation in policy representation on the EU dimension between countries and individual parties.

Drawing mainly on existing comparative research on policy representation, we put forward eight hypotheses, which were tested with data from the EES2004 survey carried out immediately after the June 2004 EP elections. Our findings offered only partial support for the hypotheses. In line with previous research, we first showed that parties are closer to their voters on the left/right dimension than on the EU dimension. Then we confirmed that parties are more supportive of European integration than are their voters. We expected party system characteristics (number of parties, ideological range) to have an effect on opinion congruence, but this was clearly refuted by our analysis. The responsiveness analysis at the party level produced several findings: government parties were less responsive than opposition parties; party size was related to responsiveness, with opinion congruence higher in smaller parties; and responsiveness was lower among centrist parties. Our study also confirms that European parties, at least in the old member states, fail to offer enough competing alternatives to voters over European integration. This bodes ill for the 'responsible party model', whose basic premise is that parties offer competing choices to the voters, who then vote for the party that is closest to their preferences. However, the importance of this lack of congruence between parties and their voters depends on the salience of EU matters. If voters care mainly about left/right issues, and not about issues related to European integration, then parties may be considered to be acting 'responsibly' even if they offer fewer choices to voters on the EU dimension than on the left/right dimension.

Perhaps the most interesting result concerns policy representation in the new member states. Contrary to our hypothesis, voters are actually better represented by their parties on the EU dimension in the new member countries than in the older EU member states. We assume that this difference between the old and new member countries might result from the EU occupying a more central place on the political agendas of these countries. After all, the June 2004 EP elections took place just over a month after the enlargement, which had in 9 out of 10 new member states been preceded by membership referenda. Hence parties had been forced to express their positions on European integration, or at least on membership, with citizens thus exposed to information about parties' European policies. This stands in quite striking contrast to the old member states, where major parties have in most countries done their best not to have real debates over Europe's future.

The key to improving the quality of policy representation in EU matters would thus seem to lie in making the EU dimension more salient in national politics. However, this appears to be a slim prospect. Strategic considerations of national parties aside, the European Union -lacking a common identity and the power to raise taxes or to carry out major redistributive policieswill remain 'distant' from the voters for the foreseeable future. Hence opinion congruence on the EU dimension will continue to be lower than on the conventional left/right dimension.

Notes

We would like to thank Agnes Batory, Jacques Thomassen, Gabor Tóka and the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

1

For excellent reviews of empirical research on political representation, see [START_REF] Thomassen | Empirical Research into Political Representation: Failing Democracy or Failing Models?[END_REF] and [START_REF] Powell | Political Representation in Comparative Politics[END_REF]. 2

The EES2004 study included all the EU member states with the exception of Malta. Unfortunately, in three countries the questionnaire did not include the EU and left/right scale questions necessary for our analysis. Therefore, the data set does not include Belgium, Lithuania and Sweden. More information about the EES2004 project is available at http://www.ees-homepage.net/. 3

The appendix is available on the EUP website. See http://www. uni-konstanz.de/eup/issues.htm. 4

For a more thorough discussion and illustration of various combinations of the intercept and the slope coefficient and their implications for political representation, see Kitschelt et al. (1999: 80-7). 5

We defined parties that had average values below 4 on the 10-point left/right scale as left-wing parties. Parties with values over 7 were classified as rightwing parties.

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1 Responsiveness of different types of parties on the EU dimension.

Table 1

 1 Opinion congruence between parties and their voters, 2004.

		Distance		Bias
		----------	------------
		EU	Left/right	EU	Left/right
	Country	dimension dimension dimension dimension
	Northern Ireland	0.10	0.21	0.05	0.19
	Cyprus	0.32	0.43	0.20	-0.07
	Czech Republic	0.46	0.67	-0.13	0.04
	France	0.59	0.33	0.59	0.30
	Netherlands	0.59	0.22	0.48	0.02
	Slovakia	0.61	0.66	0.42	0.60
	Spain	0.62	0.29	0.58	0.28
	Ireland	0.73	0.43	0.70	0.26
	Italy	0.81	0.42	0.64	0.29
	Germany	0.81	0.48	0.54	0.17
	Slovenia	0.86	0.60	0.86	0.60
	Denmark	0.91	0.40	0.44	0.18
	Estonia	0.96	0.43	0.73	0.12
	Latvia	0.97	0.54	0.97	0.34
	Greece	0.99	0.34	0.44	0.19
	Poland	1.03	0.73	-0.13	0.41
	Portugal	1.04	0.81	0.64	0.51
	Austria	1.20	0.51	1.20	0.18
	Finland	1.39	0.43	1.39	0.21
	Luxembourg	1.42	0.76	1.43	0.71
	Hungary	1.51	0.31	1.52	0.23
	Great Britain	1.60	0.51	1.60	0.51
	All countries (N = 122)	0.90	0.47	0.70	0.28
	Old member states (N = 79)	0.92	0.43	0.77	0.28
	New member states (N = 43)	0.86	0.54	0.56	0.27

Table 2

 2 Regression analyses of opinion congruence and political system characteristics

		Distance		Bias
		----------	------------
		EU	Left/right	EU	Left/right
		dimension dimension dimension dimension
	Constant	0.85**	0.39**	1.04**	0.35
		(0.22)	(0.14)	(0.32)	(0.22)
	Number of parties	-0.07	0.01	-0.04	0.02
		(0.44)	(0.03)	(0.07)	(0.04)
	Ideological range	0.11*	0.02	-0.04	-0.03
		(0.05)	(0.02)	(0.07)	(0.04)
	New member state	0.00	0.10	-0.18	0.00
		(0.11)	(0.07)	(0.11)	(0.11)
	R 2	.07	.03	.02	.01
	Notes: Standard errors in parentheses.

* p < .05, ** p < .01, N = 122.

Table 3

 3 Regression analyses of party responsiveness on the EU dimension

		Parties in old	Parties in new
	All parties	member states	member states
	-

European Union Politics 7(4)

Mattila and Raunio Cautious Voters -Supportive Parties

About the authors