European Political Groups Research Articles

The relationships between Europarties and European political groups: changing formal and informal rules and the Spitzenkandidatur

The condition of EU democracy is hotly debated and European Parliament’s political groups and Europarties play an important role in continuing power struggles between European Union institutions. To harness the increased power of both the European Parliament and European citizens, the formal and informal relationships between the political groups and Europarties matter, with the Spitzenkandidatur process as a crucial aspect. Using a dataset of 135 semi-structured interviews, this article looks beneath the formal rules that structure European Parliament’s political groups and Europarties. Exploring how MEPs construct these relationships, it discusses leadership, institutionalisation and stances toward European integration as core elements of the relationship between Europarties and political groups in the European Parliament.

Radicalisation and discursive accommodation: responses to rising Euroscepticism in the European Parliament

The rise of Euroscepticism has shifted the structure of political conflict in the European Parliament (EP) towards an increasingly dominant pro-/anti-EU divide. Focusing on the hard case of EU enlargement, this article examines changes in MEPs’ discursive and voting patterns over the past two EP mandates. It combines two original datasets containing MEP statements during plenary debates and subsequent roll-call votes to examine the polarisation, cohesion, and consistency of legislative behaviour across different European Political Groups. The findings show that soft Eurosceptics drive a deepening of the pro-/anti-EU divide by radicalising in both discourse and vote to join hard Eurosceptics in their firm rejection of further enlargement. Pro-European MEPs, in contrast, show discursive accommodation of Eurosceptic concerns, with a growing inconsistency between sceptical discourse and continued vote-based support for enlargement-related initiatives. A case study of Turkey illustrates these two mechanisms. The findings shed light on the changing dynamics of political competition in the EP and the impact of rising Euroscepticism upon MEPs’ legislative behaviour.

Policy preferences, unity, and floor dissent in the European Parliament

ABSTRACT To what extent do individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have policy and ideological incentives to vote against their European Political Groups (EPGs) and national party delegations (NPDs), and how often they act on these by voting against the party line? Documenting over-time variations in incentives to dissent in floor votes using five waves of surveys of MEPs, covering the years 1994–2019, this article shows that while these have generally decreased over time, they remain substantial. Further, by combining individual floor voting records on legislation and individual MEP survey responses for the 2004–2009 EP, the article shows that while individual MEP preferences significantly influence the decision to dissent from the EPG line in floor votes, this is not the case for voting against their NPD, lending support to the argument that the primary principal for MEPs is their national party, not their EPG.

Representation of Lithuanian Citizens in the European Parliament: Between European and National Interests

The article analyzes the problem of conflict of European and national interests in the activities of a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). The study seeks answers to the following questions: what factors impact the decision and voting of EP members, elected in Lithuania, in the plenary sessions in the cases of collision of interests, and to what extent the interests of the electorate, national parties, or European political groups are important to MEPs elected in Lithuania. To achieve the goal, first, a review of the scientific literature on the representation of interests in the European Parliament, the issues of conflict of interests is carried out. Next, the theoretical model of the “two-level game,” which is applied in the analysis of an MEP’s activities, is discussed. In the second part of the article, a Lithuanian case study is carried out, analyzing the data of semistructured interviews with MEPs, results of public opinion poll of the Lithuanian population, and other quantitative data. The results show that MEPs elected in Lithuania, like the MEPs elected in other countries, face the problem of a conflict of interests. The inquiry also revealed that an MEP’s decision on how to vote in an EP plenary session depends not only on whether they are a member of the opposition or the ruling party, but also on their personal preferences.

Competing Principals and Non-Vote Decisions in the European Parliament

Abstract This article analyses the effects of competing principals on legislators’ decisions not to vote in the European Parliament. We argue that Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are likely to decide not to vote to avoid defecting from either the national party or the European political group when both political principals disagree. Moreover, the article demonstrates that competing demands between principals interact with the expected closeness of a vote. MEPs are more likely to opt for not voting when they have few chances to influence the vote outcome and are torn between the two main principals. Based on a novel data set on individual votes in the 2009–2014 term, this article demonstrates that competing demands moderate the effect of the expected vote closeness on non-vote decisions and highlights the need to incorporate this type of legislative non-response in future research.

Is there a selection bias in roll call votes? Evidence from the European Parliament

We examine the magnitude and significance of selection bias in roll call votes. Prior to 2009, all recorded (roll call) votes in the European Parliament had to be requested explicitly by European Political Groups. Since 2009, a roll call vote has been mandatory on all final legislative votes. We exploit that change in the rules and compare differences between final legislative votes, amendment votes and non-legislative votes before and after 2009, using a difference-in-differences approach with extensive controls. Using data from the Sixth (2004–2009) to Seventh (2009–2014) European Parliaments, we fail to find any large differences in voting cohesion for the main political groups. We find even less significance when we control for changes in parliamentary membership between those two periods. The results suggest that selection biases in the European Parliament associated with strategic choices are negligible.

Legislative Behavior in the Seventh European Parliament and the Regulation of Shale Gas Development in the European Union

AbstractThis study addresses the regulation of shale gas development in the European Union, the role of the European Parliament in the formation of such regulation, and the factors that are associated with legislative behavior in the Seventh European Parliament. I test hypotheses about the influence of member state‐level characteristics related to the benefits and risks of shale gas such as economic development, decarbonization, energy security, and environmental protection. The results show that the member state‐level characteristics are weakly related to the voting behavior of members of the European Parliament. Only one seems especially salient: greenhouse gas emissions intensity. Party cohesion among European political groups holds greater explanatory power, suggesting that the most influential factors are ideological rather than provincial. The EP's role as a force for environmental protection in the EU may be moderated by member state interests and the competencies justifying supranational energy policy.Highlights The EP has rejected language both calling for moratoria and supporting high shale gas production. Party cohesion is the strongest factor associated with roll call votes on shale gas. MEPs may also be influenced by the potential for decarbonization.

Rola europejskich partii politycznych w ramach ponadnarodowego systemu parlamentarnego

The chapter deals with the role of the European political parties within the composite framework of the Euro-national parliamentary system. To this end, the genesis and the developments of the European political parties are retraced taking into account the evolution of national political parties and their rules, in particular in Italy, as the former are likewise strongly affected by national political and constitutional dynamics, as well as from global challenges like the financial and migration crises, the terrorist threat, and the environmental problems. The chapters focuses first on the main evolutionary stages of the European political parties. In this context, the chapters then examines the relationship, still undervalued, between European political parties and groups in the EP and, finally, analyses the main novelties of the Regulation EU no. 1141/2014, the experiment of the Spitzenkadidaten and the attempt to adopt an uniform electoral procedure for the EP.

A Clash of Civilizations?: Pegida and the Rise of Cultural Nationalism

Since its founding in 2014, Pegida has positioned itself as a populist movement striving to limit immigration and to preserve Germany’s cultural heritage. It has also aligned itself with other right-wing European political groups whose exclusionary views are rooted in theories of a civilizational clash between the West and the Islamic world. Pegida’s pushback against immigration also includes appeals to resist globalization and the growth of multiculturalism by embracing what Verena Stolcke has termed “cultural fundamentalism.” This ideology assumes cultural hierarchies and segregates religious and ethnic groups spatially and geographical as a means to maintain cultural uniformity. In doing so, Pegida posits that it is not racist or xenophobic, rather that it seeks solidarity in maintaining Western cultural values. The danger in Pegida’s ideology is that it rejects not only constitutional principles and notions of cultural pluralism, but that it furthers a cultural divide that need not exist and, in fact, embraces an exclusionary nationalism that is not unlike the values that they purport to reject.

Оценка распределения влияния между политическими группами в Европейском парламенте в 1979-2014 гг.

The author analyzes the power distribution among political groups in the European Parliament from 1979 till 2014. Agent’s voting power is treated as the capability to influence the result of collective decision-making process. Often the voting power is not equal to votes share the agent possess. We obtain the values of classical and modified power indices for European political groups and compare their performance. The Banzhaf power index is employed to measure European political groups’ a priori power that does not impose any restrictions on coalition formation, and power indices that take into account groups’ preferences in coalition formation in order to measure actual voting power. Classical power indices are calculated using only votes’ distribution in the committee and a quota to pass a decision. Pairwise preferences allow to have respect to different willingness of groups to form a single coalition. In this paper preferences are modeled using the roll-call data from the votings on important issues of European politics. The less popular is the MP’s position, the smaller is the number of coalitions she can enter and the less is the voting power. We demonstrate that factions can exploit their position and acquire higher relative power than both share of seats and the Banzhaf index measures, and the Liberal group of the European Parliament forming coalitions with both partners from the left and the right is the case. Conversely, hard restrictions on formation of coalitions due to ideological differences can lead to less actual voting power than a priori.

Bicameralism in the European Union: parliamentary scrutiny as a tool for reinforcing party unity

During recent years, the European Union has increasingly been portrayed as a bicameral political system in which political parties build bridges across the European Parliament (EP) and the Council. From this perspective, national parties’ representation in the Council should affect their members’ voting behaviour in the EP. Survey evidence reveals that most members of the EP (MEPs) frequently receive voting instructions from ‘their’ ministers. Accordingly, these MEPs should have a higher likelihood of defecting from their European Political Group. The observed voting instructions imply that the voting preferences of MEPs and their ministers differ. This article argues that parliamentary scrutiny may be one way effectively to coordinate on a common position at an early stage and, consequently, reinforce party unity at the voting stage. However, effective scrutiny depends on national parliaments being strong enough. On the empirical side, this article studies the voting behaviour of MEPs from eight member states during the Sixth EP. We include four national parliaments which the literature conceives of as being strong (DK, DE, SF, SK) and four parliaments conceived of as being weak (FR, IE, IT, UK). Overall, the results support the theoretical argument, thereby demonstrating how domestic-level scrutiny affects EU-level voting behaviour.

National or European Politicians? Gauging MEPs Polarity When Russia is Concerned

The European Parliament (EP) is viewed as a normal parliament. Voting patterns of its members (MEPs) are mainly aligned with transnational political groups, not national cleavages. Yet, it has been proven by many that MEP voting patterns are an outcome of conflicting pressures and a distorted indicator of their individual political orientations. In this study we rely on MEP written questions to the European Commission to measure the policy positions and their determinants. Using the universe of 100,000 such questions in 2002–2015 linked with MEP country and European Political Group affiliation data, we test whether one issue of high sensitivity to their domestic audiences — Russia — makes the MEPs take their nationality seriously and pay more attention to it regardless of their transnational partisan affiliations. We rely on supervised machine learning to uncover sentiment of every question asked on a negative-positive scale. Then we contrast the sentiment of questions related to Russia with the rest of questions conditional on party and national affiliation of the MEP asking the question. We find that (i) MEP question involving Russia is twice as negative in tonality as an average question, (ii) more variation in modality of Russia-related questions is explained by MEP national affiliation than her EPG. Our findings are robust to alternative methods of sentiment extraction and to controlling for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity of MEPs.

IDEOLOGICAL AND STRATEGIC EUROSCEPTICISM IN EU POLITICS

After the 2014 European Parliament elections the voices of Eurosceptic forces have become increasingly louder, with their activity beginning to have direct infl uence on the EU politics, which can be proved by the results of the 23rd June UK’s EU referendum. Consequently, the interpretation of the term “Euroscepticism” and its typology is of a particular interest in the academic world. This article compares such varieties of Euroscepticism as “ideological” and “strategic”. Basing on the defi nitions, given by N. Sitter, P. Kopecky and C. Mudde, the author analyses the policies of the United Kingdom Independence Party and the Italian “Five Star Movement”. While both parties, calling for the withdrawal from the EU and the Eurozone respectively, and being members of the same European Parliament political group (Europe for Freedom and Direct Democracy) are considered anti-EU forces, Euroscepticism is not playing the same role in their policies. This can be explained by different historic attitude of the British and the Italians towards the European integration as well as different problems which the countries have to face being the EU members. Through examining the process of the parties’ institutionalization, their structure, and analyzing their initial aims, election programs, party leaders’ speeches and voting tactics in the European Parliament the author consistently proves that while in case of UKIP Euroscepticism is ideological and completely defi nes the party policy, in case of M5S it is purely strategic and aimed at attracting the electorate.

Why do European political groups call the roll?

Research on legislative behaviour in the European Parliament is heavily reliant on recorded votes. Previous theoretical work has uncovered competing selection mechanisms that might cause a vote to be recorded. It has been argued that European Political Groups call the roll because the voting mode affects MEPs’ voting decisions. However, the underlying causal mechanism, as well as the size and direction of this effect, remains a matter of dispute. Drawing on a unique dataset, the article puts these arguments to an empirical test, the results suggesting that European Political Groups are more likely to call the roll if they stand to benefit from an overall lower level of voting cohesion. Moreover, I find that roll-call votes are frequently motivated by position-taking rather than by policy-seeking motives. These findings have significant, but ambivalent, implications for the analysis of recorded votes in the European Parliament.

A Common Left-Right Scale for Voters and Parties in Europe

This article presents a scaling approach to jointly estimate the locations of voters, parties, and European political groups on a common left-right scale. Although most comparative research assumes that cross-national comparisons of voters and parties are possible, few correct for systematic biases commonly known to exist in surveys or examine whether survey data are comparable across countries. Our scaling method addresses scale perception in surveys and links cross-national surveys through new bridging observations. We apply our approach to the 2009 European Election Survey and demonstrate that the improvement in party estimates that one gains from fixing various survey bias issues is significant. Our scaling strategy provides left-right positions of voters and of 162 political parties, and we demonstrate that variables based on rescaled voter and party positions on the left-right dimension significantly improve the fit of a cross-national vote choice model.

Domestic-level Parliamentary Scrutiny and Voting Behaviour in the European Parliament

Inside the European Parliament political groups reveal levels of voting cohesion similar to that we observe in national parliaments. Faced with a conflict of interests between their national party and their European group, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) surprisingly often prioritize the latter principal over the former. In this article, I argue that domestic-level parliamentary scrutiny can have a tremendous impact on MEPs’ loyalties. Using data on the voting behaviour of German and Czech MEPs, I find that, under scrutiny, MEPs from governing parties are significantly more likely to vote against the instructions of their group leadership. The effect of domestic-level scrutiny on MEPs from opposition parties is weaker and depends on the dossier's political salience. These results provide further support for the strategic use of parliamentary scrutiny in European Union politics.

Adaptive behaviour in the European Parliament: Learning to balance competing demands

Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behaviour. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioural patterns of incumbent members in the Sixth European Parliament. The latter provides an excellent opportunity to study such adaptive behaviour; in addition to newly elected members from 15 former states, new members from ten accession countries took seats for the first time. We examine how voting behaviour differs between new members from the 15 former states, new members from accession countries, and incumbent members. Our analysis shows that new members from former states defect less from their European political group than incumbents, while new accession country members defect more. Over time, the differences between these groups disappear.

Adaptive Behavior in the European Parliament: Learning to Balance Competing Demands

Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex, and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behavior. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioral patterns of incumbent members in the 6th European Parliament. The 6th EP provides an excellent opportunity to study such adaptive behavior; in addition to newly elected members from EU15 states, new MEPs from ten accession countries took seats for the first time. We examine how voting behavior differs between new members from EU15 states, new members from accession countries, and incumbent members. Our analysis shows that new EU15 members defect less from their European political group than incumbents, while new accession country members defect more. Over time, the differences between these groups disappear.

Look who’s talking: Parliamentary debate in the European Union

Legislative speeches are an important part of parliamentary activity in the European Parliament (EP). Using a new dataset on EP speeches, this paper offers an explanation for participation in legislative debates. We argue that floor speeches partially serve as a communication tool between members of parliament, their national parties, and their European political groups. EP group dissidents often go on record by taking the floor when there is a conflict between their national party and their European political group. In this instance, members give speeches for two reasons: to explain their national party’s position to other members of their EP political group, and to create a positive record for themselves in the eyes of the national party to serve their own reelection purposes.

Legislators' Voting Behavior with Two Principals and Party Cohesion

This paper studies legislators’ voting behavior with two principals and explores a new way of aggregating their behavior with respect to party cohesion. In particular, it focuses on members of the European Parliament (EP) whose voting behavior is influenced by both the national party leadership and the European Political Group (EPG) leadership. In so doing, it addresses the question of developing an observationally equivalent measure of national party cohesion in the EP. Theoretically, two different voting circumstances for MEPs’ voting behavior are specified with respect to the cooperation and the conflict between a national party and an EPG. It is shown that depending on the circumstances, MEPs’ behavioral incentives work differently. As a consequence, MEPs’ voting records are generated conditioned by totally independent voting mechanism. In this regard, this paper develops a weighting method of measuring national party cohesion consistent with the independent roll call record generation processes. Results show that the new measurement produces valid scores of national party cohesion in accordance with our empirical expectations.