Ballot structure, list flexibility and policy representation

Däubler, Thomas; Hix, Simon

doi:10.1080/13501763.2017.1361465

Cited by 22 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The increase in the European Parliament's (EP's) legislative power post-Lisbon Treaty was matched by a surge in studies investigating the legislative behaviour of members of European Parliament (MEPs) (Hix & Høyland 2013). A consolidated body of research examined how institutional factors and individual-level characteristics shape MEPs as political actors navigating a multilevel system of governance and the challenge of multiple political principals (Daübler & Hix 2018). Recognizing its growing institutional relevance and status as a key lobbying venue, scholars of European Union (EU) interest groups also started examining the EP in light of theories of interest representation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legislators, organizations and ties: Understanding interest group recognition in the European Parliament

Ibenskas

Bunea

2020

European J Political Res

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What explains Members of European Parliament's (MEPs') decisions to recognize some interest groups as relevant policy actors? Addressing this question is fundamental for understanding the role of political elites in shaping patterns of interest representation and interest groups' role in legislative decision making. Building on theories of legislative behaviour and informational theories of legislative lobbying, we argue that MEPs give recognition to those organizations that are instrumental for achieving key political goals: re-election, careerprogression and policy influence. The pursuit of these goals generates different patterns of MEP recognition of interest groups. We contribute to the literature in three ways. Conceptually, we propose interest group recognition as a key concept for understanding interactions and links between legislative and non-legislative actors. We illustrate the high conceptual relevance of recognition for interest groups research while noting its conspicuous neglect in the literature. We address this gap and place the concept central stage in understanding legislators' attention to and behaviour towards interest organizations. Theoretically, we build on a classic framework explaining legislators' behaviour and refine it through the lenses of informational theories of legislative lobbying. We argue and show that legislators recognize organizations that enhance electoral prospects in their home Member States, and that legislator-group ideological proximity and an interest group's prominence in a specific policy field affect MEPs' decisions to recognize some organizations as relevant actors. Our argument acknowledges the importance of the broader context in which MEPs operate and pays attention to how they react to and interact with it. Empirically, we propose an original and innovative research design to identify and measure recognition with the help of social media data. Our measurement strategy constitutes a significant improvement insofar that it reduces the challenges of measurement bias usually associated with self-reported data generated through interviews, surveys, or the textual analysis of newspaper articles and official documents. Our research design allows using fine-grained measures of key dependent and explanatory variables and offers the very first analysis of MEP interest group recognition that holds across decision-making events and policy areas. We test our argument on a new dataset with 4 million observations recording the recognition of more than 7,000 organizations by 80 per cent of MEPs serving in EP8. We find that MEPs are more likely to recognize organizations from their Member State, particularly under flexible-and open-list electoral institutions. MEPs are also more likely to recognize organizations that share their ideological affinities and are prominent actors in policy areas legislators specialize in.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legislators, organizations and ties: Understanding interest group recognition in the European Parliament

Ibenskas

Bunea

2020

European J Political Res

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“…The key element to understand how parties field candidates for elections is ballot structure (Däubler & Hix, 2018;Norris & Lovenduski, 1995, pp. 28, 29).…”

Section: Figure 1 Party Members and Elected Representatives 1994-2018mentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting Party Activists on Local Lists

Otjes¹,

Boogers²,

Voerman³

2020

Politics of the Low Countries

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This article examines what explains the performance of Dutch local party branches in the recruitment of candidates for municipal councils. Fielding a list of candidates is the most basic function of political parties. In the Netherlands, party branches are under pressure from the low number of party members. To analyse how branches fulfil their role in recruitment, we employ our own survey of the secretaries of party branches held in the run-up to the 2018 municipal election. We find that party membership drives the successful fulfilment of the recruitment function but that, more than the absolute number of members, the crucial factors are how these party members cooperate, the number of active members and the development of this number.

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“…However, systematic empirical studies of such electoral causes and consequences are scarce and somewhat limited in scope. 1 This remains a limitation of the literature on this topic because the large variety of electoral systems used in EP elections (Däubler and Hix, 2018;Farrell and Scully, 2007) may result in considerable heterogeneity in representational behavior (e.g. Bowler and Farrell, 2011;Hix, 2004;Hix and Hagemann, 2009) and electoral accountability (Sorace, 2021;Wilson et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing COMEPELDA: Comprehensive European Parliament electoral data covering rules, parties and candidates

Däubler

Chiru

Hermansen

2021

European Union Politics

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We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, candidate, member of parliament) and join them with external information. Currently, the data cover four elections (1999–2014). Among other aspects, the collection should facilitate research on the European Parliament's allegedly weak electoral connection. In this article, we outline the main features of the datasets, describe patterns of intra-party competition and preference voting and conduct exploratory analyses of individual-level changes in list positions.

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Ballot structure, list flexibility and policy representation

Cited by 22 publications

References 27 publications

Legislators, organizations and ties: Understanding interest group recognition in the European Parliament

Legislators, organizations and ties: Understanding interest group recognition in the European Parliament

Getting Party Activists on Local Lists

Introducing COMEPELDA: Comprehensive European Parliament electoral data covering rules, parties and candidates

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