Anyway, AI is a managerial technology that came out of fields where researchers act more like managers than researchers and this is not a coincidence. It’s fundamentally related to why certain people jumped at the chance to try to build certain kinds of systems that devalued (other people’s) work.
A blue-tinted picture of the European Parliaments hemicycle in Strasbourg. Text reading: "New feature: Datawrapper templates". On the left side of the picture, there is a smartphone displaying a barchart showing the number of MEPs in each political group and how they voted.
📊 Ever wanted to include a graph of how MEPs voted in your own writing?
We provide three @datawrapper.de templates that you can use with a single click!
Use them out of the box or customize them further, preloaded with the data of any vote available on howtheyvote.eu.
(This shows the output of a (quite naive) baysian IRT model. Maybe I should rerun that some time with the current data, had a few relevant votes since then - takes significant time though. I like the model mainly bc it confirms what you'd expect, still like the Country/Group crosstab viz)
Somewhat relevant, related graph: Latent support for Ukraine over all relevant "final votes" from 2022 until April 25. Nordic countries above their group averages, esp. among the more "sceptic" groups. Hungarian EPP clearly below the group average.
Great weekend-trip to Brussels!
@nvondarza.bsky.social I propose to call this one the „full-house majority“
Not the most important thing today, but given the fact that recent resolutions in the EU Parliament on Venezuela were carried by the EPP with all the far-right groups - now literally called the Venezuela majority - how the EU Parliament will take a position on Trump's Venezuela occupation.
If you are at #39C3 and would like to talk about tracking the European Parliament - either from a technical or a PolSci perspective - please reach out.
Especially interested in all-things-far-right, insights into EP admin and making the EUs legislative process more accessible - would love to chat!
Having these debates at all implies something like a "firewall" exists (or at least should) - otherwise, not much to be seen here. And if there is/was/should be a "firewall", it needs to be held up/broken by the non-far-right groups. Focusing on "voting with" grants the narrative to the far-right.
As for ECR: I guess there are debates to be had whether that's far-right or not, but PfE is usually considered to be to the right of ECR; and as this is about arguments made (primarily) by conservatives, not counting ECR as far-right actually does their argument a favor.
Looking at who enabled majorities puts the agency towards democratic groups - and their willingness to find compromises. Knowing there is no majority via non-far-right groups and still going for the vote is a decision that does not involve the far-right.
The major difference between voting "with" the far-right and depending on far-right votes for the majority, imo, is a question of agency/power. If we were to deal with "firewall" questions on the basis of voting "with", all power lies with the far-right. They alone could make votes "toxic".
Taking this GMO vote: howtheyvote.eu/votes/181829
453 (FOR) - 86 (FOR PfE/ESN) = 367
171 (AGAINST) + 86 (flipped) = 257 -> still passes
On the other hand: howtheyvote.eu/votes/180948
382 - 76 = 306 (FOR with PfE flipped)
249 + 76 = 325 (NO with PfE flipped) -> not passing, PfE votes necessary
For the GMO votes linked in the newsletter, if all of PfE and ESN had voted against, the votes would still have passed. This is not the case for the votes passed with Venezuela majority. Usually, you can flip the ESN votes, but PfE was a cornerstone of the majority.
I argue: The deciding factor does not lie in who votes with whom (I dont think people would argue that unanimous decision are scandalous) but whose votes are **necessary** for a vote to succeed.
One way to derive this: flipping the FOR of ECR/PfE/ESN to NO and checking majority.
This is another great newsletter by @nvondarza.bsky.social and if you are interested in EP roll-call votes - subscribe!
Regarding the "left + far-right" majority, a short thread on why I think this has to be treated/seen differently from the 🇻🇪 majority votes: It's about who *makes* decisions.
Makes sense. Same argument as in the Merz interview then, although the also said they would do that more often (which the numbers don’t confirm). Thanks!
This is actually a pattern that has been visible for a while. I did some calculations to fact-check Merz summer Interview and I found this in quite many of the gen-modified crop votes. Can clean that up and share if anyone’s interested.
Why is this dubbed the “Weber example” now? I missed that…
For the @euobserver.com, in cooperation with Novaya Gazeta Europe, @kominmo.bsky.social & Vitovt Kopytok provide an overview of pro-russian voting behavior and its rise in the 10th EP - based on HowTheyVote.eu data. Interesting read and highly recommended visuals!
euobserver.com/eu-and-the-w...
He continued to say that S&D had voted more often with the far-right than the EPP. Based on all roll-call votes of the 10th term, this was factually false.
Arguably, a quantitative approach to this doesnt even make sense, but imo this is a clear attempt of normalizing exactly scenarios like today.
In his summer interview, Merz made it very explicit that he sees tabling motions and having "one or another" party agree with them as different from cooperating. While that was in the context of 2/3 majorities necessary in the German Bundestag, he mentioned that this regularly happens in the EP.
Very much looking forward to presenting recent experimental findings on voters’ perceptions of election polls @mzes-ssdl.bsky.social (@mzesunimannheim.bsky.social) next week!
Over @howtheyvote.eu, I try to take a look back at each EP plenary session once it's done, and I had a second to look for interesting patterns in the votes - the roundup for the last plenary session at the end of october just dropped!