Party Policy and Group Affiliation in the European Parliament

Abstract

While much attention has been paid to party politics in the European Parliament (EP), systematic empirical research has yet explained the basis on which national parties affiliate with the EP political groups. Our paper addresses this lacuna in three ways. First, we use empirical measures on party positions to demonstrate that EP party groups consist of national parties that share similar policy positions. Second, we explain party group as driven by policy congruence, using Bayesian/MCMC methods to estimate the policy determinants of group affiliation using a (conditional) multinomial logit model. Finally, we use the predictions from the model to identify which national parties are not in their "ideally congruent" EP groups. Data consist of an originally constructed dataset of national party affiliation in EP groups at the time of the 2004 EP election and national political party policy positions from expert surveys of party positions. Our findings suggest that national party organization and switching into EP groups is driven mainly by a concern to minimize policy incongruence between the national and transnational levels.Key Words: Party Competition, Policy Positions, European Parliament, Expert Surveys, Party Switching, Applied Bayesian statistics. * Support for this project was provided by the Institute for International Integration Studies, Trinity College, Dublin and by the European Commission Fifth Framework (project number SERD-2002-00061). We thank Alex Baturo, Tímea Kacskovics Marina McGale and Slava Mikhailov for research assistance, and the Trinity College Working Group on Statistical Learning for feedback. Author contact information: Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland; e-mail mcelroy@tcd.ie and kbenoit@tcd.ie. 1Party politics in the European Union is organized at two levels. In each of the EU's 27 member states, national political parties contest elections and fulfill other traditional party roles. In the European Parliament (EP), national political parties also form into party groups, groupings of like-minded national parties at the transnational level, fulfilling many of the legislative and representative functions of their national counterparts. The process whereby national parties affiliate into EP party groupings is thought to be driven primarily by ideological compatibility, but its exact workings remain largely unstudied.Despite growing attention in legislative studies to the EP, this question of what drives national party affiliation into EP groups remains largely unanswered. Party groups have been analyzed in terms of voting cohesion but never, at least using systematic empirical evidence, in terms of the ideological or programmatic cohesion of their constituent national members. 1 Our analysis, by contrast, finds that the fundamental driving force behind national party affiliation in EP party groups is policy congruence: National political parties will seek membership in EP party groups whose policy platforms are closest to their own, on their most ...

Bicameralism, nationality and party cohesion in the European Parliament

“…Hix et al 2007) and on ideological congruence (McElroy and Benoit 2010;2012). However, the similarity in our research findings was not a foregone conclusion.…”

“…McElroy and Benoit examine the ideological cohesion of national parties in EP party groups based on expert judgements of those parties' ideological positions (McElroy and Benoit 2010;2012). Thomassen and Schmitt (1999;see also Thomassen et al 2004) use data from surveys of MEPs to determine how cohesive and distinctive party groups are in relation to a set of broad policy questions.…”

Aggregation and Representation in European Parliament Party Groups

“…The logic of spatial analysis (Enelow and Hinich 1984;McElroy and Benoit 2010) is that each national party should join a group whose members are closest to its own programme. A multinational party group can be representative if the programmes that their national parties put to their respective electorates are collectively in agreement.…”

European Parliament elections and EU governance

“…Thus, while there are no available policy alternatives as the basis of voting decision in EP elections since there are no pan-European political parties competing for the votes of a pan-European electorate, Thomassen (2009b: 14) suggests that focusing on the feasibility of an effective party government model, the relevant question becomes whether "national party systems can be aggregated into distinct and cohesive European party groups". McElroy and Benoit (2010) analyse the determinants of EP party group affiliation and show that party group choice is largely driven by policy congruence, while the organisation of and switching between EP party groups is determined largely by decisions to minimise the incongruence between the national and European levels. This suggests that even if the electorate makes decisions in the EP elections based on national issues and votes for parties based on their positions on national issues, this may serve the function of a good informational shortcut for voters.…”