Going on record: Revisiting the logic of roll-call vote requests in the European Parliament

Abstract

While many contributions on legislative politics in the European Parliament rely on recorded votes, the motivations behind the decision to record a vote remain somewhat arcane. This article frames roll-call vote requests as a minority right which offers party groups an opportunity to shape the voting agenda and signal commitment to a policy proposal. The analysis adds to our understanding of legislative behavior by linking the committee stage to the plenary stage. Party groups which do not support a floor proposal drafted by the lead committee are found to be more likely to request a roll-call vote in plenary. The quantitative evidence is supplemented by interview data which shed light both on the actors' motivations and the internal decision-making processes preceding the decision to go on record.

MEP Responses to Democratic Backsliding in Hungary and Poland. An Analysis of Agenda‐Setting and Voting Behaviour

“…It is worth noting that for all four votes it was the radical right party group ENF that requested the roll call. This is in line with Thierse's (, p. 236) argument that roll‐call vote requests ‘offer a minority the opportunity to stake out a position and to coerce a majority into taking a publicly recorded stance’ on a certain issue.…”

“…5 The use of roll-call voting data has been criticized in the literature on account of potential selection bias. Roll-call votes constitute approximately one-third of all votes cast in the EP (Carrubba et al, 2006;Høyland, 2010;Thierse, 2016;Yordanova and Mühlböck, 2015). Any party group or at least 40 MEPs can ask to call the roll.…”

Delegation of committee reports in the European Parliament

“…A key concern is that behavior during these votes may be different from behavior in other (non-recorded) votes, potentially biasing statistical inference about true preferences. There is a lively, and unresolved, debate regarding the extent of this bias (Hix et al., 2018; Hug, 2016; Yordanova and Mühlböck, 2015), as well as the empirical pattern of roll-call requests (Finke, 2015; Thierse, 2016). However, our assumption is that the group leadership faces the same bias in the recording of roll-call votes as researchers do, and simply rely on what is available to them.…”

Roll-Call Vote Selection: Implications for the Study of Legislative Politics

“…What we still do not know is whether RCVs provide a problematic understanding of legislative behavior if they do not alter voting behavior. This question is particularly important given that scholars have questioned whether RCVs are actually used to influence voting behavior (Carey 2009;Thierse 2016). Further, this is the most favorable case for RCVs to be an innocuous sample of votes.…”