Taming the Beast? European Party Group Pressure and Radical Right Populist Legislators in the 8th European Parliament: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Existing research on the European Parliament (EP) suggests that MEPs are first and foremost agents of their national parties. We do know little, however, about the question of how MEPs of radical right populist legislators are affected by European Party Group (EPG) membership. In this paper, we elaborate on this question by analyzing a rare quasi-experiment observed in the eighth European Parliament. More specifically, we focus on the case of the German party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The AfD is a crucial case for our interest since the party drastically changed its national position during its membership in the EP. While showing a rather populist and Eurosceptic agenda in the first two years of its existence, it shifted to a clear radical right populist agenda in summer 2015. As a response to this shift, several MEPs of the AfD left the national party but all MEPs remained member of the same EPG, namely the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). Only in mid-2016 the remaining radical right members of the AfD left the ECR and joined two more right-wing EPGs: the ENF (Europe of Nations and Freedom) and the EFDD (Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy). This unique situation allows us to analyze and compare the impact of national position change and EPG change on the voting behavior of radical right MEPs. By employing spatial models of parliamentary voting to all roll-call votes in the eighth EP until the end of 2016, we find that the change in the national position had only a moderate effect on the voting behavior of the AfD-MEPs, while the effect of the EPG change was several times stronger. We discuss the potential reasons for this finding.