How National Party Policy Positions and Decision-making in the European Parliament fit together – A theoretical and empirical view of political behaviour of German parties

Policy positions are highly relevant for national party competition. Amongst others, they signal parties’ view on policy issues. These policy positions are externally used by voters for their voting decisions. For the internal party dynamics policy positions are relevant as well: They have an inherent function for party members’ identification and are used as reference points for legislative decision-making. When policy positions and legislative behaviour dramatically mismatch, parties can lose credibility. A decreasing credibility can raise fundamental problems for parties because it enhances the possibility of electoral defeat and can therefore result in a loss of parliamentary seats or government office. Additionally, the organisational strength of parties can be weakened when party members choose to exit. While that interplay of these two party functions – position taking and legislative behaviour – is known for national party competition, the mechanisms of this interplay are less clear for national parties within the European multilevel system. Obviously, the necessity of coherence between national party positions and voting behaviour in the European Parliament diminishes when the lack of public attention towards European legislature is taken into account. However, today’s importance of European decision-making and the resultant adherence by national parties’ policy experts give hints that coherence across these two political levels may be more important than initially assumed. The paper provides a theoretical concept of coherence between national party positions and legislative behaviour in the European Parliament and first empirical results. This concept of coherence will give new insights into the interdependence of the national party organization and legislative behaviour in the European Parliament. First empirical results will be drawn from an own created data set on policy positions of the six major German political parties on European legislative issues and data on voting behaviour of member of the European Parliament for the period 1999 to 2009.