Foreign Policy in the European Parliament

The central question in this paper: Is foreign policy driven by national interests or by political ideologies. On the one hand, there is the idea that politics stops at the water’s edge and that foreign policy is exempted from party politics. On the other hand, there is the idea that parties of left and right, and cosmopolitan and nationalist parties have different views about foreign policy. The European Parliament is a crucial laboratory to study voting on foreign policy. Here, MEPs from different countries and with different political views vote on proposals related to foreign policy. In this arena we can see to what extent this is driven by differences between the member states MEPs come from or from the political views of the groups that they are in. This paper examines foreign policy voting by Members of the European Parliament in the fifth to eighth European Parliament. It links voting data to data about country characteristics related to their general foreign policy orientations (e.g. trade openness and experienced threat) and data on party positions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. We analyze parliamentary voting using the dyadic approach. This allows us to compare the importance of different factors simultaneously. Our analysis indicates that voting pattern on foreign policy in the European Parliament is primarily driven by party positions and not by national interests.