Legislative Organization in the European Parliament (EP): Using Committee Roll-Calls to Understand the Party-Committee Relationship

Understanding how far committees are representative of a legislature can help us assess theories of legislative organization. A growing body of work has examined the representativeness of committees in the European Parliament (EP), an important topic given Ringe’s (2009) findings that committee members are central to the formation of party positions on legislation in the EP and Yordanova’s (2013) conclusions that EP committees have been undermined by the shift to early agreements on legislation in the EU. Previous work has assessed EP committees using information on members’ experience and links to interest groups (McElroy 2006; Whitaker 2011; Yordanova 2009, 2013) or voting behaviour in plenary votes (Whitaker 2005). Some work (Settembri and Neuhold 2009) has considered how far committees reflect the kind of conflict found in roll-call votes in the EP plenary (Hix et al. 2007). Ringe (2010) uses committee members’ plenary votes to show how MEPs follow their national party or party group’s members on a committee in deciding how to vote. A problem facing all these studies is that until recently, it was not possible to see how committee members vote in committee. A change of rules in the EP in 2014 means that any single and/or final committee vote on a report must be by roll call. Using a new data set of committee roll-call votes (CRCVs), this paper presents – as far as the author is aware – the first analysis of committee roll-call voting in the EP. The paper uses CRCVs to assess the representativeness of committee contingents, how cohesive parties are in committee compared with plenary votes and whether coalition formation in committees differs from that in plenary. These questions all relate to the workshop’s thematic category on how interactions between legislators are structured and how position influences the work of members.