Four Phases of European Parliament Political Group Formation: Negotiating Power, Democracy and Gender

After every European Parliament election, we witness the formation of political groups, sometimes even during an ongoing legislature. Political groups are key actors in the democratic functioning of the EP as they are the backbone of the supra-national decision making processes of the institution. While some political groups like the EPP, S&D and Greens/EFA remained remarkably stable, others (dis)appeared and changed their national party composition considerably over the years or re-organized with a new name like recently Renew Europe (RE) succeeding ALDE. The formation of the radical right populist ID attracted extensive public media attention too. The procedures of political group formation are rather formalized, yet, not well researched in political science, and we know almost nothing about informal aspects of group formation and the relevance of normative standpoints. The aim of this paper is to develop a framework of four distinct phases in the political group formation to analyse how the groups are formed, what issues are at stake, how they are negotiated, how EP resources come into play and how leadership positions are allocated. Our focus is on the 8th and the 9th EP legislature and we draw on an extensive data set of 70 interviews with MEPs and members of staff from all of the political groups. In addition to providing the novel framework of political group formation we examine what ‘work’ gender does in the ways that political groups in the parliament come into existence and what happens to gender equality norms. This further illuminates the power relations and questions about democratic representation at stake in the process of political group formation in the EP.