Are popular and powerful committees more representative? Evidence from the ninth European Parliament

Abstract

The standing committees of the European Parliament perform crucial policy-making functions and, accordingly, the question of how they are composed assumes great relevance. Unlike previous studies, which primarily looked at committee assignments from the perspective of individual MEPs, we assess the representativeness of entire committees by comparing their preference distributions with those we find in the plenary on the left/right and pro/anti EU dimension. For our analysis, we combine new data on committee memberships in the ninth European Parliament with data on policy preferences of national parties from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. In order to assess committee representativeness, we calculate the extent to which the preference distributions of committees and the plenary overlap. We show that committee representativeness is a function of committee popularity and power. Committee popularity provides party groups with a larger pool of applicants to choose from and since popular committees are often also quite large, the formation of representative committees is facilitated. Moreover, the party groups of the European Parliament have stronger incentives to form balanced committee contingents for powerful committees, resulting in higher committee representativeness. However, this latter finding is qualified by two outliers and we only find the hypothesized relationship to hold on the pro/anti EU dimension.

Shadows as leaders? The amendment success of shadow rapporteurs in the European Parliament

“…Hurka and Kaplaner (2020) argue that the conventional ideology dimensions might be too broad to explain policy conflict at the committee stage. They propose to focus on more policy-specific preference measures (Hurka and Kaplaner, 2020: 7). Further studies could examine the influence of special interests, such as trade unions (see Yordanova, 2013: 53), on the amendment success of shadows to account for the interest-driven nature of the employment committee.…”

“…Future research may consider how salient a policy is to party groups and their shadows to shed more light on eventual logrolling dynamics at this stage of the policy-making process. Hurka and Kaplaner (2020) argue that the conventional ideology dimensions might be too broad to explain policy conflict at the committee stage. They propose to focus on more policy-specific preference measures (Hurka and Kaplaner, 2020: 7).…”

Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament

“…Second, the patterns we identified in this study might vary both across policy areas. For instance, we might find that effects of policy complexity are particularly severe in EP committees with a particularly high workload or in committees less representative of the plenum (Hurka and Kaplaner, 2020). Similarly, given the increase in the complexity of the Commission's legislative proposals over time, also the strengths of the effects we identified here might have increased over time.…”