Fractionalized but ambitious? Voting on energy and climate policy in the European Parliament

ABSTRACT

Analysing roll call votes from the energy and climate policy field in the Eighth European Parliament (2014–2019), this article asks why has the European Parliament succeeded in maintaining its relatively ambitious position and how national and partizan factors explain voting behaviour of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on EU energy and climate legislation. We find the Eurosceptic vs. pro-EU cleavage to be the main conflict line structuring voting on energy and climate policy. Additionally, EU energy and climate policy has been supported by MEPs from member states with a track record of more ambitious climate policymaking and those with higher energy dependence. We show that increasing party fragmentation in the European Parliament has strengthened the influence of some progressive party groups, particularly the Greens, and has enhanced the European Parliament’s ability to mobilize support for a relatively ambitious energy and climate legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• EU energy and climate policy
• European Parliament
• MEPs
• populist parties
• roll call votes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a workshop organized under the auspices of the Jean-Monnet Network ‘Governing the EU’s Climate and Energy Transition in Turbulent Times’ (GOVTRAN) in Rome, the ECPR’s General Conference in Wrocław and the ‘OSI-bag’ Comparative Politics Colloquium at Freie Universität Berlin. We thank participants of these events, the journal’s reviewers, the three editors of the Special Issue for their helpful comments and Lauren Goshen for her editorial assistance. Aron Buzogány acknowledges support through the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Visiting Fellowship at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C. Open access funding was generously by provided by the GOVTRAN network (600328-EPP-1-2018-1-BE-EPPJMO-NETWORK).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 While the data structure might call for multilevel analysis as MEPs are nested in parties, which are nested in countries, the intra-class correlation test, which shows the correlation of the observations within a cluster, showed that this is not necessary (ICC= 0.05).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aron Buzogány

Aron Buzogány is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Forest, Environmental, and Natural Resource Policy, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU), Vienna, Austria.

Stefan Ćetković

Stefan Ćetković is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Bavarian School of Public Policy at the Technical University of Munich, Germany.