6.1 Causation?

The causal question raises the cruel possibility that we have not progressed very far since Section 2 first asked whether the EU’s party politics do anything more than co-ordinate the engagement of national parties with Union institutions? How, indeed, can we even be sure that there is a party system at Union level worth studying, as opposed to a series of mechanisms that do little more than co-ordinate national party adaptations to Europe (Ladrech 2002 ; Poguntke et al. 2006 )?

The limits on how far existing knowledge allows us to answer this question are well illustrated through the example of the EP groups. We know that it is the decision of whole national party delegations to defect or stay loyal in individual votes that best explains the much vaunted cohesion of the groups (Faas 2003 ). Likewise, much of what we know about incentives and identities suggests that it makes more sense to take national party delegations, rather than the EP groups themselves, as the basic units of the Parliament.

National parties are better placed than the EP groups to steer the behaviours of individual MEPs. In the short-term, even those rewards and sanctions that are dispensed by the groups – committee memberships and chairs, and opportunities for MEPs to shape the Parliament’s agenda through rapporteurships – are distributed to individual MEPs through the medium of national party delegations (on this see esp. Kreppel 2002 : 202-209; also McElroy 2006 : 12). In the long-term, it is national parties that have the power to play snakes and ladders with the careers of MEPs by issuing passports back to domestic politics (Andolfato 1994 ), or by deciding on their re-adoption as candidates in subsequent European elections. The use in most Member States of closed lists – in which chances of political survival are not just dependent on being re-adopted, but on the order in which parties present their candidates – creates intense competition amongst MEPs to please national parties.

At a more sociological level, MEPs identify somewhat more with their national parties than their EP party group. In an analysis of MEP role conceptions, Roger Scully and David Farrell’s found that the mean importance attached to representing national parties and EP group was 3.64 and 3.42 respectively. Whereas 25.9 per cent gave the maximum score of ‘5’ to representing their national party, only 14.6 per cent did the same for their party group (Scully and Farrell 2003 : 272).

Yet, anyone who has conducted interviews in the European Parliament will know how often MEPs claim that they contribute through their participation in the EP groups to whatever preferences their national parties have on many EU issues. It is thus possible that systemic indicators, based on incentives and identity indicators based on loyalties, point to the groups being less important than their component national parties, whilst cognitive indicators based on patterns of preference formation point to the opposite conclusion.

However, the implication of the systemic/cognitive distinction that the groups have influence but not power may even sell the groups short. In particular, the distinction may be a false one if the ‘system component’ is equated only with the application of incentives and sanctions by organised hierarchies. On the analogy of the theory of perfect competition in micro-economics, the ‘systemness of the system’ may consist not so much in organised concentrations of power as in the smallness of many of the units in relation to the whole. Although, of course, there are some large national party delegations in the EP, their average size is only 4-5 MEPs.

All this may plausibly have further implications for the ‘party systemness’ of the EP. Consider the argument that EP party groups have developed as means of reducing transactions costs between national party delegations (Hix et al. 2005 : 212). At first sight, this is just the kind of theory that reduces the groups to a marginal role as pure co-ordination mechanisms. But here some further insights can be added. First, the power of legislators in all kinds of system is linked to how they organise and accumulate expertise by dividing labours between themselves, usually through developing efficient interfaces between parties and committees (Krehbiel 1991 ). Second, expertise acquired within a specific division of labour means that switches of allegiance will usually incur costs while staying put will usually yield increasing returns (Pierson 2000 ). Third, less than one in twenty national party delegations have enough MEPs to cover all the committees of the Parliament and even those that do would have little chance of getting the committee assignments of their choice if they attempted to operate outside the group structure. Fourth, probably only three groups – the EPP, PES and the ELDR – have the numbers both to accumulate expertise across the range of committees and exercise power (as measured by power indices) in each committee. All this implies not only that national parties which want to participate in the effective use of the Parliament’s powers have to operate within a group, but such parties also have few plausible options in choosing which group to affiliate with.

In sum, then, our knowledge of incentive structures and identities is insufficient to ground the conclusion that the EP groups are causally less significant than their component national delegations. It is possible that the organisation of knowledge and ‘voice’ gives the groups real ‘systemness’ and structural power. Yet, we are far from knowing this for certain. In contrast to all that we know about voting behaviour in the Parliament, there is little firm evidence beyond the hearsay of interested actors of where and how preferences get to be formed or valuable forms of expertise get to be accumulated. ‘Large n’ case studies using methods of process tracing would be the obvious way to fill the gap.