Outcome variable

MS have to shoulder a large part of the financial costs of the personnel and troops they deploy to ESDP missions, including their training. Because of this, and because of the fact that personnel is a crucial component in ESDP operations, the number of personnel sent is a good measure of burden-sharing between the different MS. There are three different types of ESDP missions: civilian, military, and mixed. Out of the twenty-three ESDP missions since its launch in 2003, only five have been purely military (ARTEMIS, EUFOR CONGO, EUFOR CHAD/RCA, EUFOR ALTHEA, and CONCORDIA).

The outcome variable for ESDP thus focuses on the deployment of personnel to civilian and mixed civilian-military missions. Personnel figures are not publicly available and have been obtained from the Council's Secretariat. The variable measures the personnel seconded by the MS to civilian and mixed civilian-military ESDP missions in the period September 2005 to December 2007. Unfortunately, bi-monthly figures previous to September 2005 are not available. Given that most civilian missions are still deployed, and that practically all of those missions that have been completed did so after September 2005, the study includes practically every civilian and mixed operation of the EU. Considering that there have only been five purely military operations, the great majority of ESDP operations to date are included in the analysis.

Independent variables

POLITICAL PARTIES

Political parties are expected to have a direct effect on governmental positions towards efp, but they also might exert an indirect effect through public opinion and the mass media, and they might also affect the popularity of the executive. The data for this variable was obtained through the Chapel Hill Survey carried out by the University of North Carolina. This is an expert survey undertaken by Erica Edwards, Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Moira Nelson, David Scott, Marco Steenbergen, and Milada Vachudova, which asks country experts to evaluate the positions of national political parties on European integration on a seven-point scale (ranging from 1 to 7). The lowest score represents strong opposition to and the highest strong support for European integration. This score is also applied to different issue areas, one of which is foreign and security policy.