Committee Representation in the European Parliament

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThe European Parliament (EP) possesses a highly specialized committee system, operating in a complex institutional and political environment, yet little empirical work has investigated how MEPs are assigned to EP committees and what consequences this process has for representation and policy-making. In this article I examine the growth of EP committees and committee membership since 1979, and address the question of whether these committees are representative of the EP as a whole. Using an original data set of committee membership, national and EP party affiliation, MEP characteristics, and MEP policy preferences derived from roll-call votes, I address three key questions: Does committee membership reflect the party group composition of the EP? Do committee members possess specialized expertise in their committees' policy areas? And, finally, do committee members' general or committee-specific policy preferences differ substantially from those of the overall Parliament? The results suggest very strongly that, although committee members do tend to possess policy-specific expertise, committees are, nonetheless, highly representative of the EP as a whole, in terms of both party and policy representation.

Party politics as usual? The role of political parties in EU legislative decision-making

“…This finding was confirmed in a later study by McElroy (2006). Examining the EP's conciliation delegation, Rasmussen (2008a) has also recently shown that the ideological positions of the delegates are generally in line with the EP party groups.…”

Committee autonomy in parliamentary systems – coalition logic or congressional rationales?

“…Research on committee assignments outside the US initially focused primarily on the European Parliament (e.g. McElroy, 2006;Whitaker, 2005;Yordanova, 2009) and relied heavily on the congressional framework. With regard to national parliaments, a number of empirical studies argued that committee assignments are based on electoral rules or candidate selection procedures (Crisp, Escobar-Lemmon, Jones, Jones, & Taylor-Robinson, 2009;Stratmann & Baur, 2002).…”

The Quality of Deliberation in Two Committees of the European Parliament: The Neglected Influence of the Situational Context and the Policymaking Stage

“…To identify the relevance of situational variables, we conducted qualitative interviews with the main actors of debate [58] [59,60]). Due to increasing workload, the decision-making process has been rationalized and the working load divided among the members ( [61]).…”