Linking Council and European Parliament? Voting unity of national parties in bicameral EU decision-making

Abstract

The two institutions forming the bicameral EU legislature, Council and European Parliament, are composed of representatives who belong to national political parties. In traditional European bicameral systems, parties are the main factor linking the different chambers. Do national parties similarly provide a linkage mechanism between chambers in the EU, by co-ordinating voting behaviour of ministers and MEPs? For example, do MEPs unite with ‘their’ minister against a proposal if sincere national or party-political interests are touched? Based on a dataset combining Council votes with EP roll-calls, the analysis reveals that voting behaviour might differ considerably between institutions. While ministers are subject to the logic of Council consensus, MEPs are influenced by their transnational EP groups. Internal party co-ordination across institutions is thus rare. Ministers and MEPs hardly ever vote united against a proposal.

Keywords:

• Bicameralism
• European Union
• national parties
• voting behaviour

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Simon Hix and Sara Hagemann for providing me with their data. I received helpful comments on previous versions of this article from Sylvia Kritzinger, Stefanie Bailer, Gail McElroy, Richard Corbett, Julie Smith, Martin Ejnar Hansen and three anonymous referees.

Notes

The basic dataset is thus the same as in Mühlböck (2012). However, while the present article tries to give an overview of the data, the analysis in Mühlböck (2012) has a different focus and draws only on a small subset of the data, studying those instances where MEPs had to decide between voting with their party's minister and their EP group.

See http://consilium.europa.eu.

Although ‘real’ voting by the show of hand hardly ever takes place, the Council Presidency is informed about the different positions of the member states and can announce when agreement in favour of a proposal is reached. Individual member states might then record their opinions in the minutes. These records are then published as ‘votes’ (see Mühlböck 2011).

A national party delegation consists of all MEPs of the same national party.

In contrast to Krebiehl (1993), I do only focus on the action itself and not on the motives for the action;. i.e., it does not matter whether party members act cohesively owing to shared preferences or disciplining mechanism by the party leadership.

Taking a threshold other than 50 per cent does not alter the results significantly, as the national MEP delegations are hardly ever split. Most of the time, either all the MEPs of a national party vote with their minister, or all the MEPs of a national party vote against the minister. Abstentions were thereby treated differently for the two institutions. Owing to the fact that under qualified majority rule, abstentions by ministers in the Council have the purpose and the same effect as ‘No’ votes, they are treated as such. This form of coding is common for the study of Council votes, as the difference between a country registering a ‘No’ in the minutes and a country registering ‘Abstain’ can be neglected because both is used to exhibit opposition to a proposal (Hagemann 2008). In EP plenary votes, the effect of abstentions is ambiguous. Consequentially, MEP abstentions are not incorporated in the analysis.