National parties and group membership in the European Parliament: ideology or pragmatism?

Abstract

This contribution investigates the factors behind political group membership in the European Parliament. In June 2009, more than 150 national parties, from the 27 member countries, joined one of the seven transnational groupings. Two main explanations for group membership are advanced. A first, traditional argument is based on the ideological or policy compatibility of the member parties. National parties will join the political group that best matches their programmatic position. A second argument focuses, instead, on the structure of incentives in the Parliament, positing that the pragmatic goals of national parties are better advanced by joining the largest and most influential groups. These arguments are tested by fitting a multinomial logit model for political group ‘choice’ based on the 2009 Euromanifestos data. The findings suggest that ideological compatibility is the most important factor behind transnational affiliation, even if some caution is needed for the ‘new’, post-communist members.

Keywords:

• EU enlargement
• Euromanifestos
• European Parliament
• ideology
• political groups

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My most sincere gratitude to Peter Mair, for having patiently read several drafts of this contribution, and to Natalia Timus, for the organization of the panel on ‘Euro-parties: Widening versus Deepening’ at the 2011 European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Conference. This contribution benefitted greatly from the thoughtful comments of Steven van Hecke. Luciano Bardi, Mark Franklin, Adrienne Héritier, Emanuele Pollio, Maria Francesca Romano, Richard Rose and Alexander H. Trechsel advised me at various stages of this research; and Paolo Frumento and Umberto Olcese shared with me their statistical expertise. Finally, I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and Amie Kreppel for her editorial advice.

Notes

Indeed, as the Treaty of Lisbon states: ‘The functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy’ and ‘political parties at European level contribute … to expressing the will of the citizens of the Union’ (Art. 10).

Non-attached members do not have voting rights in the Conference of the Presidents; they are allocated a residual fraction of the speaking time in the plenary and are very rarely attributed important parliamentary offices and reports.

Regulation (EC) No 2004/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 November 2003 amended by Regulation (EC) No 1524/2007.

Moreover, for CE parties, transnational affiliation also represented an important source of legitimacy ‘at home’. When several parties are struggling to occupy the same portion of the ideological space, Europarty membership could offer a competitive advantage.

The selection of these scales is based on two criteria. First, such scales are included in most studies on Europarty positions and differences (Klingemann et al. 2007: 29–56; Trechsel and Mair 2011). Second, a descriptive analysis of the Euromanifestos reveals that the selected scales capture the most salient issues (Bardi et al. 2010: 10–31).

Scales on market economy, environment and liberal-conservatism are ‘confrontational’, that is computed by subtracting opposing categories. The scale on welfare is ‘additive’ and is computed as the sum of pro-welfare categories. On ‘confrontational’ vs ‘additive’ scales, see Klingemann et al. (2007: 114).

It could be argued that it is not really the size, but rather the relative size of a national party in a political group that matters: being a medium-sized delegation in a large group is less likely to have valuable payoffs than being a large delegation in a small or medium-sized group (I thank a reviewer for the point). However, the most coveted office positions and important reports are largely attributed to either the EPP or the S&D. For instance, when in 2009 the British Tories left the EPP, where they would have been the fourth-largest delegation, for the ECR, where they are the largest one, the Financial Times (2009) bluntly titled: ‘Neutered Tories’ .

Very few parties do not issue a proper Euromanifesto. When this is the case, the EMP has searched for a ‘substitute’. Here, leaders' declarations and short flyers have not been considered as proper ‘substitutes’. Being very succinct documents, they return implausible estimates.

If we apply a majority rule, predicting every national party in the modal outcome category (the EPP), we would obtain the 29 per cent of correct predictions.