Simon Hix
Room H307
Government Department
LSE, Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7955 7657
E-mail:
s.hix@lse.ac.uk
last updated on:
10 March 2010
Welcome
to the home page of
Simon Hix
Professor of European and
Comparative Politics
Department of Government,
London School of Economics and Political Science
Hix-Noury-Roland European Parliament Roll-Call Vote Data
Crombez-Hix-Warntjen data on the Party Political Make-up of the EU Institutions
Websites
www.votewatch.eu. This website tracks voting behaviour in the European Parliament. This is a collaborative project by myself, Sara Hagemann (also LSE), Abdul Noury (New York University), and Doru Frantescu (QVORUM Institute). (see Financial Times report).
www.predict09.eu. This website presents predictions for the June 2009 European Parliament elections, from research with Michael Marsh (Trinity College Dublin) and Nick Vivyan (LSE). (see EUobserver report).
Recent Media Contributions
"The 2009 European Parliament Elections: A Disaster for Social Democrats", EU Studies Association Review, 3 November 2009.
"Recognition at last for Political Science", Financial Times letter on the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for Elinor Ostrom, 15 October 2009.
"EU is Flawed, But it Can be Fixed", Daily Telegraph, 28 September 2009.
LSE "Hot Seat" interview on the outcome of the 2009 European Parliament elections, 19 June 2009.
BBC The Record: Europe discussion about the outcome of the 2009 European Parliament elections, 13 June 2009.
BBC interview about www.VoteWatch.eu website, 16 May 2009.
"Viewpoint: A truly European vote?", BBC Website, 5 May 2009.
Books
Simon Hix (2008) What's Wrong With the European Union and How to Fix It, Polity Press. (see Polity website).
Simon Hix, Abdul Noury and Gerard Roland (2007) Democratic Politics in the European Parliament,
Cambridge University Press. (see
CUP website). This book won the Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize for the best book
on legislative studies published in 2007, from the Legislative Studies
Section of the American Political Science Association.
Latest
Research Papers
(see
more)
Simon Hix, Ron Johnston and Iain McLean, Choosing an Electoral System (10 March 2010). This is a report for the British Academy, which sets out the issues, options and trade-offs for electors, parties, and designers on the question of electoral system design in the UK, based on the experiences of how electoral systems have worked in Britain and elsewhere in the world.
Simon Hix, What to Expect in the 2009-14 European Parliament: Return of the Grand Coalition? (1 August 2009). This is a policy briefing paper for the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies. The paper looks at what is likely to happen in the new European Parliament, and argues that although an EPP-PES 'grand coalition' was necessary at the start of the Parliament, it is not likely to be stable on most legislative issues in the coming years. (see description on European Parliament website)
Simon Hix and John Carey, The Electoral Sweet Spot: Low-Magnitude Proportional Electoral Systems (version 19 June 2009). In this paper we argue that the trade-off between representation and accountability in the design of electoral systems is convex rather than linear. Specifically, one can gain most of the advantages attributed to PR while sacrificing less of those attributed to single-member districts by maintaining relatively small multi-member districts. We test this intuition with data from 610 elections in 81 countries between 1945 and 2006, and find that small multi-member districts produce disproportionality indices almost as low as large multi-member districts yet also keep the number of parties down and do well on some of the key indicators of government performance.
Simon Hix, Bjorn Hoyland and Nick Vivyan, From Doves to Hawks: A Spatial Analysis of Voting in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England (version 28 January 2009). This paper applies a Bayesian method to estimate the ideal points of the members of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). The results suggest that Gordon Brown appointed 'Doves' to the MPC before the 2001 election, which went hand in hand with his tight public spending plans. But, since 2001 Brown has appointed 'Hawks' to the MPC, as he has increased public spending.
Simon Hix and Sara Hagemann, Could Changing the Electoral Rules Fix European Parliament Elections? (version 14 January 2009). This paper argues that while reforming the electoral system of the European Parliament is unlikely to change the 'second order' nature of these elections, introducing small districts and open ballots (preferential voting) would change the incentives for candidates to campaign directly to citizens and enable citizens to reward MEPs for good performance in the European Parliament. An earlier version was presented at the European Parliament's hearings on the reform of its electoral system in March 2008 .
Simon Hix and Hae-Won Jun, Party Behaviour in the Parliamentary Arena: The Case of the Korean National Assembly (now published in Party Politics). This paper investigates the nature of party behaviour in South Korean National Assembly. We apply a scaling metric to uncover the main dimensions of politics in the Korean parliament and look at how KNA members' ideological preferences, regional interests and the shift from divided to unified government shapes relations between parties in this chamber. We find that party behaviour in the KNA is primarily ideological: based around a progressive-conservative dimension. We also find that the geopolitical element of this divide (relating to attitudes towards North Korea and the USA) is more salient than the socio-economic (left-right) element.
Simon Hix and Abdul Noury, After Enlargement: Voting Patterns in the Sixth European Parliament (now published in Legislative Studies Quarterly). This paper looks at patterns of MEP voting and party behaviour in the first half (July 2004 to December 2007) of the current European Parliament. Despite the addition of 10 new member states, voting in the European Parliament is still primarily along transnational party lines rather than national lines. Nevertheless, the MEPs from the new10 member states do sometimes vote differently from their colleagues from the old15 member states, as was the case on the Services Directive.
Simon Hix and Abdul Noury, Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Fourteen Parliaments (version 1 May 2008). This paper shows that government-oppositions splits dominate roll-call votes in parliamentary systems (such as the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Belgium, Czech Republic, Italy and Israel) while left-right preferences and government-opposition behaviour tend to co-exist in (semi-)presidential systems (such as the US, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Poland, South Korea, and Switzerland).
Links:
LSE Political Science and Political Economy Group
European
Union Politics
European
Parliament Research Group
EP
Animate
West Ham
United FC
Matthew Shugart's elections and electoral systems blog
Josep
Colomer's political science blog
Simon
Jackman's blog on politics, statistics and computing
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