A Selectoral Punishment and Reward Mechanism in EP Elections: Hard Work, Safe Seat?

Taking legislative turnover in the EP as a starting point, this paper examines in how far legislative behavior of MEPs increases their chance for a renewed mandate in Brussels. Depending on the actor deciding the faith of the incumbent aspiring to return, legislative turnover is traditionally split in two categories. Either aspirants are not successful in gaining nomination by their party’s selectorate (selectoral turnover), or candidates suffer electoral defeat (electoral turnover). We highlight that selectoral turnover is not limited to the mere de- or re-selection of incumbents, but also includes the (type of) ballot position incumbents are re-selected to. While some incumbents are not re-selected at all, others may be re-selected to ballot positions that give little to no prospect of electoral success. Being re-selected to a ‘low-value’ position is conductive of electoral defeat but surely refers to selectoral turnover as the party selectorates knowingly decide the aspirants’ faith. This ‘choice before the choice’ (Rahat and Hazan, 2010) therefore is crucial for our understanding of the political elite’s composition. “By the time voters are called to make a choice at the ballot, [candidate turnover] has already been delimited by party selectorate choices” (Gouglas & Maddens, 2017, p. 3). In this context it is crucial to understand the (s)electoral value of ballot positions and to differentiate between realistic, marginal and hopeless list positions. While realistic positions give candidates near guarantee of being elected into office, marginal positions give reasonable but uncertain hope, and candidates on hopeless positions have no true electoral prospect at all. We argue that party leaderships and selectorates are well aware of the values of each of these position types and will nominate candidates to specific positions accordingly. The more because we may expect any electoral punishment and reward dynamic to be weak (or absent) in ‘the second-order’ European elections (Reif & Schmitt, 1980; Schmitt, 2005; Hix & Marsh, 2017), it is worthwhile to investigate whether “a link can still be made between the behavior of MEPs and their likelihood of getting re-elected, namely through the role that the national party leadership plays” (Van Geffen, 2018, p.37). If then, we want to know whether the actions of incumbents in the Parliament are rewarded by selectorates, we should look at whether or not parliamentary performance impacts an incumbents’ chance to be re-selected to a realistic position. In this paper we propose an operationalization of (the number and ballot placement of) realistic, marginal and hopeless positions in European Parliament elections, after which we map the 2014 selectoral turnover in the EP differentiating between de-selection, and re-nomination to ‘low-value’ ballot positions. In a second step, we test whether parliamentary activity (7th EP legislature) affects the chances of an MEP being re-nominated to a position with high electoral prospects (2014 election). In terms of parliamentary performance we look at rapporteurships, own initiative reports, attendance to plenary roll-call votes and committee (vice-)chairmanships. We control for age, gender, EPG and electoral system and member state.