An Increased Role for Seniority? Committee Chair Selection in the European Parliament (1979-2014)

In the European Parliament committee chairs have the power to shape the committee agenda, they solve jurisdictional disputes in the Conference of Committee Chairs and receive a large number of rapporteurships (Yoshinaka et al 2010; Hurka and Kaeding 2012). Successive waves of EPRG surveys (Hix et al 2016) have shown that this position is one of the most appealing for MEPs. While past descriptive research has depicted the formal allocation of committee chairs between European Party Groups and national delegations within them, we know virtually nothing about how committee chairs are selected and whether committee seniority and chair seniority influence their selection. The only partial exception (Withaker 2011) conflated in the analysis the selection of chairs with that of deputy chairs and was restricted to only two terms. This paper draws on an unique longitudinal dataset that includes all full committee members, information on their past committee experience and office in the first seven terms of the EP (1979-2014), and data on their parties and national delegations. Our theoretical expectations are derived mostly from congressional theories of committee leadership and tested using a series of fixed effects conditional logit models. Special attention is given to differentiating between committee chair selection in salient committees - those that have a high legislative output or budgetary powers - and less salient committees.