Patterns of roll-call vote requests in the European Parliament

Studies of roll-call votes provide us with a unique insight into individual-level legislative behavior in EU politics. However, critiques warn against generalizing from roll-calls because they are requested strategically, for example, to signal a policy position or to enforce party group cohesion. What are the patterns of roll-call vote requests and do they suggest strategic behavior? To address this question, we leverage newly collected data on all roll-call vote requests in the European Parliament for the last two-and-a-half legislatures, from 2009 until today. We sketch the patterns of roll-call requests over time, across procedures, policy areas, and actors to evaluate the degree of (un)representativeness of roll-call votes along these dimensions. We contribute to a rich literature on legislative behavior in the European Union that is based on roll-call voting and that assumes that roll-calls are a representative sample of all voting in the European Parliament. In addition, we add to the scholarly debate on the representativeness of roll-call votes with a more comprehensive large-scale study than has been carried out on EP legislation to date.