Description
European elections have long been regarded as “second-order elections” because their outcome reflects member states’ electoral cycles. But to what extent is national politics relevant not only for the electoral process, but also for the work and voting in the European Parliament (EP)? Can members of the European Parliament (MEPs) be held accountable to their constituency under its current electoral system? And what does this mean for voters’ ability to control their representatives in the EP, i.e., for electoral accountability? In this paper, we tackle the question of whether the European Parliament can be regarded as a “second-order Parliament”, that is, whether national political developments drive European Party Groups’ deliberations. While previous studies show that MEPs do respond to their national party’s directives, there is no study yet that looks at parliamentary responsiveness from a structural perspective, taking policy positions of national parties as well as the difference between their European and national stance into account. We develop a theory of voting cohesion within European Parliament groups (EPGs) as a function of national politics and the lack of a European principal, which we then test using panel data from the European parliament, exploiting the quasi-random nature of national election dates. This design allows us to show to which policy preferences matter, as well as to what extent European policy preferences of national parties (i) are sincere and (ii) matter for cohesion within EPGs.
