Political cycles, competing loyalties and voting behaviour in the European Parliament

This paper investigates the effect of time and competing demands on the legislative behaviour of members of the European Parliament (EP). Looking at broad, aggregate trends in legislative behaviour, scholars have found cohesion to grow over time in a quasi-linear fashion. Most existing studies concentrate on the effects of procedural change through Treaty reform and successive enlargements on the cohesion of political groups. 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 MEPs to adapt to the electoral agenda and to deal with competing loyalties towards their EP Group and their national political party. Hence, we expect legislative behaviour in the EP to be defined not only defined by EP elections, but also by national electoral cycles, which change 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 the loyalty of national party delegations to their EP groups, using a new dataset of roll-call votes on codecision files concluded between 1999 and 2014. Our findings will allow us to reflect on the politicisation of the EU political system as well as on legislative behaviour and representation in a context of multilevel governance.