It is often said that European Parliament elections fail as an
instrument to express the will of the European people. However, while the
elections are not contested at the European level and are often dominated by
national issues, this does not necessarily imply that the elections fail to
connect the policy preferences of voters to the policy positions of
representatives. In this paper we examine the policy link between voters and
candidates in European Parliament elections. More specifically, we analyse
whether policy preferences are constrained by a single ideological dimension,
whether political groups in the European Parliament are sufficiently distinct
to offer clear choices to voters on the main policy dimension(s), and finally
whether parties and their voters have similar policy positions. We utilize the
Candidate Survey and Voter Survey of the European Parliament Election Study
2009. Against expectations, we find that the quality of representation is not
noticeably higher on issues related to the left/right dimension than on other
issues, such as immigration and EU integration.