Aggregation and Representation in European Parliament Party Groups

Abstract

While members of the European Parliament are elected in national constituencies, their votes are determined by the aggregation of MEPs in multinational party groups. The uncoordinated aggregation of national party programmes in multinational EP party groups challenges theories of representation based on national parties and parliaments. This article provides a theoretical means of understanding representation by linking the aggregation of dozens of national party programmes in different EP party groups to the aggregation of groups to produce the parliamentary majority needed to enact policies. Drawing on an original data source of national party programmes, the EU Profiler, the article shows that the EP majorities created by aggregating MEP votes in party groups are best explained by cartel theories. These give priority to strengthening the EP’s collective capacity to enact policies rather than voting in accord with the programmes they were nationally elected to represent.

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of a project on Representing Europeans funded by British ESRC grant RES-062-23-1892. In preparing this paper, the first-named author benefited from the hospitality of the European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre. Earlier versions were given at the European Union Studies Association conference and at a Workshop at the European University Institute, Florence.

Notes

1. .In this article the term party refers to the national organisations that contest seats in one of the EP’s national constituencies. The term ‘party group’ describes the eight organisations recognised in the organisation of the activities of the European Parliament.

2. .The Lisbon Treaty fixes 751 as the maximum number of MEPs. Because the Treaty came into effect in the middle of the current Parliament, the number of MEPs elected in 2009 was 736.

3. .The five parties it did not classify elected only seven MEPs scattered among five different EP party groups.

4. .Having five dimensions, rather than the three identified in analyses of roll call votes (Hix et al. 2007) suggests that the issues raised in roll call voting may be narrower than those that parties deal with in programmes that they prepare for EP elections.

5. .Full details available from the authors.

6. .Because there is a third alternative, a national party taking a neutral position, a plurality rather than an absolute majority of MEPs can form the largest portion in a Group.

7. .These figures cannot be interpreted as evidence of MEPs representing the European electorate, because of gross disparities in the number of electors for each MEP between electorates in more and less populous states due to the EP’s requirement of digressive proportionality (see Rose et al. 2012).

8. .The bimodal distribution of the groups’ MEPs is confirmed by their distance from each other on the +2.0 to –2.0 scale. On welfare, the EPP score is –1.00 and that of the Socialists 1.50. On opposition to immigration, the respective scores are 1.00 and –0.67. On permissiveness scores are –1.50 and 0.00; and on the Green dimension 0.00 and 0.67. European integration is the only dimension where there is a unimodal distribution of the two groups: 1.43 for each.

9. .Voting together by parties less opposed in spatial terms than EPP and Socialists is only 9 per cent higher for the EPP and ALDE, and only 8 per cent higher for Socialist–ALDE voting.

10. .Detailed results available from the authors.

11. .Mattila and Raunio (2012) confirm that respondents see the national parties that they vote for as more pro-integration than themselves, but do not consider the implications of their finding for the formation of a cartel promoting integration in the interest of EP party groups.