European party competition: is there a liberty-security dimension?

The axes of competition between European parties have been investigated since the early years of this body’s election. A plethora of studies (Hix and Lord, 1996 Hix, Noury and Roland, 2005, 2006 and 2007, Hix and Noury 2009, Hix and Høyland, 2013, Raunio 1997) have demonstrated several trends in European Parliament voting. First, it was shown that the main line of party polarization is the left-right division and that voting behavior tends to be well-predicted by a party’s positioning on this dimension. Secondly, using the Hix-Noury-Roland party cohesion index, researchers were able to show that cohesion among parliamentary groups is increasing, while decreasing across national lines. Finally, another conclusion of these studies has been that votes on policy issues such as the 2006 Services Directive can also be predicted according to ideological lines of cleavage. This paper employs the Hix-Noury-Roland methodology to initiate an inquiry into the existence of a liberty-security dimension in the European parliament. By employing an analysis of selected European-Parliament rollcall votes, the paper aims to investigate whether the liberty-security dimension is better predicted by national affiliation or by party allegiance. It represents an exploratory case study of eight votes, cast in late 2005 on the occasion of the adoption of Directive 2006/24/EC on metadata retention (“the Big Brother directive” – invalidated in 2014 by the European Court of Justice). The paper finds that, on this particular issue, European parties were more cohesive than national groups, but that the latter were more ideologically polarized. The research involved a quantitative methodology: each of the eight votes was given a liberty-security score. Based on the number of MPs voting in a certain direction, the overall preference of each parliamentary party group and each national delegation were aggregated. The results show that, with the exception of the PES, most party groups voted according to their expected ideology. Alternatively, the national-delegation situation is mixed, with some counter-intuitive results emerging from the data.