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There is a growing body of research on the impact of the electoral system ‘ballot structure’ on the behaviour of politicians. We offer a clear, ordinal and rules-based three-way coding (closed, flexible, open) of the electoral systems used in European Parliament elections, taking into account both the ballot type and the intra-party seat-allocation rules. For the notoriously difficult group of flexible list-systems, we show how these operated in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 elections, and introduce an additional behavioural distinction between ‘weakly flexible’ and ‘strongly flexible’ subtypes at the party-list-level. We then illustrate how the type of ballot used in an election can influence individual policy representation by looking at the vote-splits between Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the European People’s Party in a vote on tackling homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As debt worries continue to shake the eurozone, Simon Hix looks at four possible scenarios for a European Union facing an existential crisis, and argues that a contested presidency provides the best hope of a more democratic approach to European politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors describe an flexible database that provides information on members of the European Parliament dating back to 1979. A number of research features have been built into the new system including the ability to find information on the political party affiliation on individual members, the names of the committees on which they served, their leadership roles and the delegations to which they were assigned. It is noted that this database will reduce costs associated with research.

This research note provides an overview of the party political make-up of EU legislative bodies for the period 1979-2004 (Commission: 1979-2007) in terms of the left-right and pro-/anti-Europe dimensions. The various methods of measuring political positions are discussed and compared. Measures for the left-right dimension based on party manifestos and expert surveys are relatively strongly correlated for the time period. This is not the case for the pro-/anti-Europe dimension. The dataset is available via the homepage of the European Legislative Politics Research Group (www.elprg.eu). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decade ago parties were largely absent from research on and theories of EU politics. The role of parties is now a central part of the research agenda, particularly in the area of EU legislative politics. The new research on parties in EU politics has made significant theoretical contributions, led to the collection and dissemination of new datasets, and employs some of the most advanced statistical methods in contemporary European political science. What is still missing, however, is a general theory of the role and impact of political parties, which helps to explain actors' behaviour in EU politics in a range of situations. This paper sketches some of the basic elements of what might be called a 'partisan theory of EU politics', starting from a discussion of how the policy and office incentives of national parties are shaped by the EU's 'upside-down polity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979–2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But these “European effects” are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite the growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding “normal” left-right policy, have much of an effect on electoral outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the dimensionality of politics in the European Parliament by applying a scaling method to all roll-call votes between 1979 and 2001 in the European Parliament. Contrary to most existing studies using these methods, we are able to interpret the substantive content of the observed dimensions using exogenous measures of national party policy positions. We find that the main dimension of politics in the European Union's only elected institution is the classic left-right dimension found in domestic politics. A second dimension is also present, although to a lesser extent, which captures government-opposition conflicts as well as national and European party positions on European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This introductory article reviews our current state of knowledge about the European Parliament (EP). First, we review the major accomplishments of previous studies of the EP, highlighting four principal areas of work: general studies of the chamber, work on EP elections, studies of the internal politics of the Parliament, and research on the EP's institutional relations with the Council and Commission. Second, we consider what has yet to be learnt: what are the major unanswered questions about the EP, and how do the articles in this special issue respond to this agenda? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the voting behaviour of Members of the European Parliament in the first year of the 1999–2004 European Parliament. The research applies the Nominate scaling method (developed to map voting in the US Congress) to the 1,031 ‘roll-call votes’ in the EP in this period. This method enables us to locate each MEP in a multi-dimensional policy space, and to plot a ‘cutting line’ for each vote. From this information we find that legislative behaviour in the EP is mainly along left—right lines, transnational party group affiliation is more important than national affiliation for determining how MEPs vote, different majority-commanding coalitions form on different issues, and the difference between the simple majority and absolute majority rules has no effect on the voting behaviour of the two main party groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the claims and counterclaims on the European Union (EU) democratic deficit, which maintains that pan-European elections and parties will only come about if the EU is transformed into a classic parliamentary system. Theoretical framework and relationships between elections/parties and institutional structure of multi-level systems; Expected patterns of party behavior.

The article reviews the current study of the European Union (EU), where a new agenda is emerging under the umbrella of 'new governance'. Despite its eclecticism, this agenda argues that the EU is not a state, but is a unique system of non-hierarchical, regulatory and deliberative governance. This agenda also conceptualizes the EU as sui generis, explains its development primarily by (new) institutional theory, and suggests that legitimacy is guaranteed through transparent, pareto-efficient and consensual outputs. Nevertheless, this agenda is open to criticism on empirical, methodological, theoretical and normative levels. Such a dialectic suggests a new duality in the study of the EU: between the new governance approach, and a less developed rival agenda, which treats EU politics and government as not inherently unique, compares the EU to other political systems, explains outcomes through rational strategic action, and suggests that legitimacy can be guaranteed through classic democratic competition over inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we revisit the main claims of Part Four of Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology and especially the changing support coalitions for parties of the left. Piketty's core argument in this part of the book is that the left now represents the highly educated and that, as a result, the redistributive preferences of the working class do not find representation in today's party systems. We address these claims building on existing political science research that has investigated the transformation of politics in advanced capitalist societies. We argue, first, that the educational divide cannot be adequately analyzed by looking at a left and a right bloc, but crucially needs to pay attention to the rise of green/left-libertarian and radical right parties. Second, we contend that the new middle classes that support parties of the left are largely in favor of economic redistribution. Analyzing data from the European Social Survey in 11 West European countries from 2002 to 2018, we show that the effect of education on voting left or right is indeed largely driven by green/left-libertarian and radical right parties, while there is little empirical evidence that social democratic parties represent the educational elite. We also find that redistributive preferences remain at the heart of voting behavior and that, especially for educated voters, these preferences determine whether someone votes for a party of the left rather than the right., (© 2021 London School of Economics and Political Science.)