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To defect or not to defect? National, institutional and party group pressures on MEPs and their consequences for party group cohesion in the European Parliament
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In this article, the authors analyzed party group cohesion and patterns of defections of national party delegations from party group lines in the European Parliament (EP), using a total of 2,582 roll call votes.Abstract:
This study analyzes party group cohesion and patterns of defections of national party delegations from party group lines in the European Parliament (EP), using a total of 2,582 roll call votes. The study confirms previous findings according to which party groups in the EP show (surprisingly) high levels of cohesion. Nevertheless, it reveals the circumstances under which Members of the EP (MEPs) and their national delegations are more likely to defect, using the candidate selection process, the electoral system and relationships between MEPs and their home parties as explanatory variables. Assuming that MEPs have three different goals (re-election, office and policy), and want above all to secure re-election, one can expect that those MEPs whose chances of re-election are more dependent on national parties than others are more willing to vote against the party group line if a conflict between party group and national party emerges. Empirically, this is confirmed.read more
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TL;DR: In this article, a formal model of delegation in the European Union is presented and a quantitative analysis of the delegation preferences of the European Parliament is presented. But the model is limited to the case studies.
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The influence of candidate selection methods on legislatures and legislators: Theoretical propositions, methodological suggestions and empirical evidence
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References
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Karlheinz Reif,Hermann Schmitt +1 more
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Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: A rank ordering of electoral formulas☆
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MonographDOI
Why parties? : the origin and transformation of political parties in America
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A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis
Keith T. Poole,Howard Rosenthal +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a general nonlinear logit model is used to analyze political choice data, and the robustness and face validity of the program outputs are evaluated on the basis of roll call voting data for the US House and Senate.
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Patterns of congressional voting
Keith T. Poole,Howard Rosenthal +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a dynamic, spatial analysis of the entire roll call voting record from 1789 to 1985 is presented, revealing a structure characterized by a predominant major dimension with, at times, a significant, but less important second dimension.