3 Aggregation of representatives’ preferences

The last section demonstrated that there is still much disagreement on how important political parties are in the EU arena and on whether the Union has in any meaningful sense developed its own form of party politics. The remainder of this review asks whether the concepts of aggregation reviewed in Section 1 can help resolve some of those disagreements?

Beginning in this section with the contribution of the EP party groups to aggregating preferences amongst representatives in the EP, much of what we know comes from roll-call analysis of how MEPs vote. Since the pioneering work of Fulvio Attina (Attinà 1990 ) roll-call analysis has been steadily perfected, notably by Simon Hix (Hix 2001 , 2002a ) and his collaborators (Hix et al. 2005 , 2006 ). Yet in spite of its sophistication, there is a suspicion that it rests on shaky foundations (Carrubba and Gabel 1999 ). Since roll-calls cover only a third of EP votes, and decisions to request them are themselves political acts, they are likely to be biased towards particular kinds of behaviour, including: a wish to demonstrate to the Commission and Council the cohesion of the Parliament as a whole, a wish to check that MEPs within a group are voting as promised, and a wish to embarrass other groups by revealing the extent of their internal divisions.

Some further information about MEP behaviour is available from survey work. The MEP Survey 2000 conducted by Simon Hix and Roger Scully for the European Parliament Research Group (EPRG) is a rich source of information on MEP policy preferences, and on their role conceptions and beliefs about representation (available at EPRG ). Also helpful is a survey by Tapio Raunio (2002 ) of the relationship between national party delegations in the EP and their parent parties in Member States. Of course, all these sources face the difficulty that the object of enquiry is itself continuously changing. The 2004 enlargement, for example, changed the composition of one third of the Parliament and brought into the party groups national parties whose background in the transition politics of East and Central Europe, arguably, differs from the more settled party politics of most of the EU15.

Assuming, however, that the roll-calls and the surveys are the best evidence available, they tell us at least the following about the aggregative behaviour of the groups:

The EP groups for the most part aggregate preferences along a left-right dimension. All the groups except the Eurosceptics are composed of left-right national party delegations. Simon Hix has used Nominate scaling to demonstrate that left-right is by far the most important explanation of voting alignments, with preferences for and against European integration forming a second, much less important, dimension (Hix 2001 : 669-676). In his work with Abdul Noury and Gérard Roland, he observes that ‘ a one per cent decrease in the ideological distance between two parties implies an increase of approximately six per cent in the probability that these parties will vote the same way. This result gives a strong indication of the importance of left-right politics in the European Parliament’ (Hix et al. 2005 : 228).
Government vs. Opposition in Member States would also seem to be a factor in the aggregation of preferences in the EP. For example, Bjorn Hoyland reaches the intriguing conclusion that MEPs from parties of government in Member States are even more likely than those from parties of opposition to support amendments at second reading of Co-decision since ‘most of the governments that supported the common position want to change the policy even further away from the status quo. Hence they try to push the policy further towards their ideal policy through amendments in the Parliament’ (Høyland 2005 ).
Country of origin, on the other hand, is rarely significant at a higher level of aggregation than national party delegations (Hix et al. 2005 : 677). Whereas, in other words, all votes allocated to a Member State are cast in the Council of Ministers as a bloc according to a single interpretation of the national interest, MEPs from the same country are dispersed between diverse ideological groupings and, for the most part, they stay that way in individual votes of the Parliament. One of the few exceptions in recent years was the Takeovers Directive which was opposed by all German MEPs.
Patterns of aggregation map fairly well onto the divisions between the party groups. In other words, MEPs vote most of the time with their party groups. Hix et al. note that the average voting cohesion of what they call the three ‘genuine European Parties’ – the EPP, PES and ELDR – was 89.1 per cent in the 1999-2004 Parliament (Hix et al. 2005 : 216). So what explains this? Some factors that might have been expected to have been negative influences on cohesion - the number of national parties whose views need to be accommodated and the related process of enlarging the Union itself – appear to have little effect. The same goes for what might have been expected to be positive influences, notably the socialisation of individuals into their groups with the passage of time spent in the European Parliament (Scully and Farrell 2003 ). In contrast, the cohesion of the groups is strongly related to the powers of the Parliament. One of the most striking findings of Hix et al. is that, controlling for other factors, the cohesion of the main groups increased by 7.1 per cent after the Amsterdam Treaty (Hix 2002b : 226-228), which, of course, extended Co-decision and redesigned it into a more level playing field between Council and Parliament.
Aggregation of preferences across groups follows two dominant inter-party alignments that can be contrasted as bipartisanship vs. bipolarity. The former consists of a Grand Coalition of the centre. Although mythically presented as a PES-EPP cartel, it may be more accurately be described as ‘bipartisanship plus’. A core EPP-PES coalition structurally underpinned by co-operation agreements between the two groups is often supplemented by the ELDR and even the Greens. Bipolarity, on the other hand, consists of the PES and EPP opposing one another, with the ELDR swinging either to the left or the right.
There are variations across issues in how far voting is bipolar or bipartisan (Hix et al. 2003 : 326). It used to be believed that this is mainly because the decision-rules of the Parliament also vary. Only a coalition including the main groups is likely to meet the ‘absolute majority rule’ that a majority of all MEPs, and not just of those voting, is needed to amend legislation. Thus, issues subject to Co-decision will produce more bipartisan voting. Since, however, bipartisanship occurs more frequently than can be explained by variation in the decision-rules of the Parliament itself, Amie Kreppel argues that it is also encouraged by the Parliament’s relationships with the other Union institutions: for ‘the EP to have any effect, it must create legislative proposals (Amendments) that are broadly acceptable’ to the Council and Commission’ which are themselves cross-party bodies (Kreppel 2000 : 346, 358).
The previous points imply that it may be easier for some representatives than others to aggregate their preferences through the EP party system. First, the dominance of left-right alignments may make it harder for those who are more interested in representing pro-anti integration views – and especially anti-integration views – to organise effectively in the Parliament. Second, parties of the far right or far left are less likely to participate in winning majorities of the Parliament. Third, representatives from some Member States may find it easier than others to aggregate preferences through the EP party system. Taking the core of the latter to be the ‘EPP-PES-ELDR’ triangle, Lori Thorlakson calculates that ‘ineffectively channeled mandates’ in the 2004-9 Parliament vary from 46.2 per cent in the case of Ireland to zero in the cases of four Member States (Thorlakson 2005 : 478-479).
The question of whether patterns of aggregation in the European Parliament are becoming more competitive and politicised has recently attracted much academic interest. What is probably beyond dispute is that competitive pressure has long influenced aggregation within the groups. The otherwise surprising tendency since the 1980s for the main EP groups to become more diffuse gatherings of more national parties, whilst also increasing their cohesion in parliamentary votes, has not just been the product of new opportunities, but also of new threats, associated with the empowerment of the Parliament. Those who care about the closeness of overall Union policies to their own preferences have had all the more reason to remove any relative inefficiency in how ‘their MEPs’ combine to use the powers of the Parliament . Thus after 1986 the centre right felt that it could no longer afford a group structure in the EP that reflected its historic division into Christian Democrats and Conservatives (Johansson 1997 ; Rinsche and Welle 1999 ). Division on the centre right made it likely that the more unified centre left would form the largest group in most Parliaments, and that in some it would amend legislation in a consistently leftwards direction, as arguably happened between 1989 and 1994.

A more contentious claim, however, is that the main groups are no longer just competing within a framework of consensus in which the name of the game is to maximise their individual contributions to decisions they eventually expect to be agreed by all the main groups. Rather, they are apparently more likely than before to vote against one another. Hix et al. claim, first, that the peak of PES/EPP bipartisanship was reached in the 1989–94 Parliament (Hix et al. 2005 : 219). Second, that the two groups have scope to decide how much or how little to co-operate on any one issue. Third, that they are more likely to vote against one another precisely where other evidence indicates they disagree most – on internal socio-economic issues (such as environment, agriculture and health and safety regulation, as opposed to institutions and external trade) (Hix et al. 2003 : 326).

Yet, Hix et al. appear to build their claim that EP party politics are becoming ‘more competitive’ on a modest drop in EPP-PES collusion from 71.0 per cent (1989–1994) to 69.2 and to 69.4 per cent respectively in the last two parliaments (1994–1999 and 1999–2004) (Hix et al. 2005 : 219-221). Indeed, Giacomo Benedetto (Benedetto 2005 ) disputes Hix’s claims in relation to almost every aspect of the work of the 1994–1999 and 1999–2004 Parliaments. In his view, high levels of EPP-PES co-operation continued to dominate voting, committee assignments, the parceling out of agenda-setting opportunities through rapporteurships, appointments to other EU offices (mainly the Commission), and the shaping of the EP’s input into the Union’s Constitutional politics.

In any case, deeper empirical and conceptual questions may need to be asked about what counts as competition and collusion. Amie Kreppel’s observation that the ‘real battles’ are at the amendment stage, whilst the ‘grand coalition’ is much more frequent in votes on final texts (Kreppel 2000 : 356), suggests that in the making of any one decision there will often be an interplay between the aggregation of preferences by competition and consensus. Benedetto provides evidence of just such an effect. Whereas in the first half of the 1999-2004 Parliament the EPP and PES voted together on 60.9 per cent of Co-decision part texts, they did so on 90.7 per cent of whole texts (Benedetto 2005 : 76, 79).