The previous sections have served to decipher the qualitative and quantitative data on the political and economic alignment of the Central and Eastern European candidate states. To bring the domain-specific results into a broader political context, we must ask ourselves how similar the scales are to each other. This allows for a potential reduction of the number of dimensions involved as well as better understanding of the motives for the given constellations. Along the same lines, it is highly constructive to compare and contrast the preferences of present and future legislative actors in terms of their similarity, aggregated over an array of political domains.
As a springboard for further research, bivariate correlation matrixes49 on the basis of state preferences and legislative actors were constructed to explain the degree of similarity of both the presented scales as well as the preferences of the present and future legislative actors. As a rule, we can speak of several tendencies, which have been singled out by the correlations (see figure 8-1). Firstly, high correlations were generated between policy domains involving product and process standards, i.e. consumer interests, environmental and social policy, indicating that legislative preferences along scales overlap each other to a certain degree. This makes it clear that we are ultimately dealing with one broader dimension, namely that of producer/economic interests vs. consumer/civic interests. As for the constellation of policy positions, the implications are clear. Enlargement will lead to an increase of the size of the legislative core as the number of states averse to any further consumer or welfare-oriented market regulation will inevitably grow.
49 The missing values were replaced with those of the most correlated state in the EU-25 bivariate analysis.
Figure 8-1 ‘How similar are the scales? Correlations between policy domains (about here)
Figure 8-2 ‘Correlations of CEEC policy positions for nine political conflicts (about here)
Otherwise, we also find a moderately high correlation (see figure 8-1) between the values measured for matters of agricultural subsides and trade policy.50 Once again, the fabric of the economy plays a significant role as the industrially oriented states tend to join the coalition of free-traders, in particular in industrial goods. Both the current and future agrarian states (e.g.
P, GR, PL), on the other hand, have a pronounced desire to protect their both their less competitive industry as well as agricultural producers by advocating protectionist measures both in the industrial and agricultural sectors (see section 7.7). This explains in part the striking similarity between Poland and France, Spain, Italy, etc., who will be policy allies in nearly all political domains, while becoming rivals when it comes to the allocation of structural and cohesion funds.
Additional bivariate correlations were carried out both among the CEECs’ preferences (figure 8-2) and with the preferences of all EU-25 states (see Appendix C).51 The data essentially do not necessarily confirm the nonchalant presumption that the future members will have equal preferences and join a common voting block (see Kerremans 1998). Instead, the data speak for relatively varying policy positions of the new members (see figure 8-2). On issues involving production costs and the division between economic and civic interests, the CEECs frequently clump together, but elsewhere we frequently find a greater variation in preferences than among the EU-15 (see Matrix EU-25 Appendix C).
The preference diversity among the candidates has the positive externality of generating greater coalition possibilities between larger current member states and new members. Instead of a voting block, we will most likely find preference clumpings among the CEECs. This applies, in particular to LT and LV, joined by SLO, whose preferences are highly correlated.
The same holds for the industrial export tigers H, CZ and SK, who will likely form coalitions in all policy areas. In particular the Mediterranean states CY and M vastly differ from their eastern European counterparts in their political disposition. The same also holds for Poland.
Its relatively extreme policy positions have made it sort of an “outsider”, even among the CEECs, as its preferences at best only moderately correlate with those of the other CEECs.
The domain-specific analyses have indicated, in fact, that Poland’s current political alignment is much more in tune with that of France and its southern counterparts (see Appendix C for
50 This appears in the matrix as a negative correlation (-.729), as the agricultural states received high values on the scale from 0 to 100 (see figure 8-1) while protectionist states received low values (see figures 7-14, 7-16).
Inverting one of the scales would of course deliver a high positive correlation.
51 Only the bivariate correlations of the CEECs are presented here for reasons of space. For the preferences of all states (EU-25) see Appendix C.
bivariate correlation EU-25) than with other CEECs. Both from an aggregate as well as domain-specific level of analysis, we find PL and F with nearly identical preferences.
The low correlations between smaller northern states (DK, S, NL) and the industrial and economically open central European states (CZ, H, SK, EST) are a bit deceiving and can basically be reverted back to the reluctant attitude of these states on process and product standards. Outside of this, though, there are solid reasons to assume that DK, NL, FIN, etc.
will find their sphere of influence in these countries, in particular when it comes to matters of external trade, economic regulation and agriculture. The strategic position of LT and LV is also of worthy of particular attention. In terms of preferences, they remain somewhat closer to the southern states and PL, but boast extensive historical and economic ties to Scandinavia and Germany (as well as Poland). Thus, it is highly likely that both fronts will exert pressure and seek to pull the Baltic States into their respective voting camps. Finally, less influential CY and M only moderately correlate with one another. Malta is the most erratic of all actors, frequently finding itself at the extreme contours of the policy space, lacking a steady ally across all policy domains. Cyprus most frequently finds itself more in line with its Mediterranean counterparts than the other CEECs (see bivariate correlations in Appendix C).