Political Cycles and Voting Cohesion in the European Parliament

This paper investigates the effect of time on the cohesion of political parties in the European Parliament. Looking at broad, aggregate trends in cohesion, scholars have found cohesion to grow over time in a quasi-linear fashion. Most existing studies concentrate on the effects of formal institutional changes through Treaty reform, procedural changes and enlargements on the voting cohesion of the political group. Yet, in the complex multilevel system that is the EU, the incentives generated through temporal cycles, and their impact on legislative behaviour, deserve a more systematic analysis, both across types of temporal cycles, and types of party groups. We argue that time in the EP can be understood both as ‘managerial time’ – the constraints imposed on party actors by parliamentary agenda cycles and intra-parliamentary dynamics – and as ‘political time’ – the need for parties and MEPs to adapt to the electoral agenda. The latter is not only defined by the EP elections, but also by national electoral cycles, which could affect cohesion by changing the incentive structure for national party delegations. Time also provides different incentives to different types of parties, such as centrist and non-centrist groups. We test the effect of different ‘types of time’ on cohesion on a new dataset of roll-call votes on all codecision files concluded between 1999 and 2014. We show that cohesion varies within a legislature in response to different political cycles, taking place at different levels. We finally build on these findings to reflect on the politicization of the EU political system in spite of the limited electoral connection.