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Electoral Institutions and Legislative Behavior: Explaining Voting Defection in the European Parliament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Simon Hix
Simon Hix
Affiliation:
The London School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract

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Despite a sophisticated understanding of the impact of electoral institutions on macrolevel political behavior, little is known about the relationship between these institutions and microlevel legislative behavior. This article reviews existing claims about this relationship and develops a model for predicting how electoral institutions affect the relationship between parliamentarians and their party principals in the context of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is an ideal laboratory for investigating these effects, because in each European Union member state, different institutions are used to elect Members of European Parliament (MEPs). The results of this model, tested on four hundred thousand individual MEP vote decisions, show that candidate-centered electoral systems (such as open-list proportional representation or single-transferable-vote systems) and decentralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians independent from their party principals. By contrast, party-centered electoral systems (such as closed-list proportional representation systems) and centralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians beholden to the parties that fight elections and choose candidates: in the case of the European Parliament, the national parties.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , January 2004 , pp. 194 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2004

References

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19 This behaviour by national parties was confirmed in interviews with inter alia Richard Corbett MEP (British Labour Party), Michiel van Hulthen MEP (Dutch Labour Party), Heidi Hautala MEP (Finnish Green Party), and Klaus Welle, the secretary-general of the Group of the European People's Party-European Democrats.

20 The data were collected as part of the “How MEPs Vote” project, in which Abdul Noury (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Gérard Roland (University of California, Berkeley), and I have compiled all the roll-call votes that took place in the European Parliament between 1979 and 2004 (approximately twelve thousand votes by two thousand MEPs). See , Hix, “Legislative Behaviour and Party Competition in the European Parliament: An Application of Nominate to the EU,” Journal ofCommon Market Studies 39 (November 2001)Google Scholar; Noury and Roland (fn. 18); and Hix, Noury, and Roland (fn. 18).

21 In other words, there are two different ways to abstain in a roll-call vote in the European Parliament: by registering an abstain vote, or by not participating in the vote. Arguably, both of these types of abstention are strategic. However, whereas an abstain vote is clearly strategic, since it involves going on record as abstaining, there are many nonstrategic reasons for nonparticipation, ranging from physical inability to be present at the time of a vote (connections to Strasbourg are few and far between) to decisions to use the time to conduct other important business. Hence, to capture the bulk of strategic abstentions, the registered abstain votes are included in the analysis, while the decisions not to participate are excluded.

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