We study the cohesion within and the coalitions between political groups in the Eighth European Parliament (2014–2019) by analyzing two entirely different aspects of the behavior of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the policy-making processes. On one hand, we analyze their co-voting patterns and, on the other, their retweeting behavior. We make use of two diverse datasets in the analysis. The first one is the roll-call vote dataset, where cohesion is regarded as the tendency to co-vote within a group, and a coalition is formed when the members of several groups exhibit a high degree of co-voting agreement on a subject. The second dataset comes from Twitter; it captures the retweeting (i.e., endorsing) behavior of the MEPs and implies cohesion (retweets within the same group) and coalitions (retweets between groups) from a completely different perspective. We employ two different methodologies to analyze the cohesion and coalitions. The first one is based on Krippendorff’s Alpha reliability, used to measure the agreement between raters in data-analysis scenarios, and the second one is based on Exponential Random Graph Models, often used in social-network analysis. We give general insights into the cohesion of political groups in the European Parliament, explore whether coalitions are formed in the same way for different policy areas, and examine to what degree the retweeting behavior of MEPs corresponds to their co-voting patterns. A novel and interesting aspect of our work is the relationship between the co-voting and retweeting patterns.
In this paper we analyze the roll-call vote data published in the minutes of the parliament's plenary sessions. For a given subject, the data contains the vote of each MEP present at the respective sitting. Roll-call vote data from the European Parliament has already been extensively studied by other authors, most notably by @cite_8 @cite_36 @cite_23 . To be able to study the cohesion and coalitions, authors like Hix, Attina, and Rice @cite_17 @cite_36 @cite_25 defined and employed a variety of agreement measures. The most prominent measure is the Agreement Index proposed by @cite_36 . This measure computes the agreement score from the size of the majority class for a particular vote. The Agreement Index, however, exhibits two drawbacks: (i) it does not account for co-voting by chance, and (ii) without a proper adaptation, it does not accommodate the scenario in which the agreement is to be measured between two different political groups.
@cite_8 @cite_36 @cite_23 @cite_25 @cite_17
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We use bill cosponsorship and roll-call vote data to compare legislators’ revealed preferences in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We estimate ideal points from bill cosponsorship data using principal-component analysis on an agreement matrix that included information on all bills introduced in the U.S. House (1973–2000) and Argentine Chamber (1983–2002). The ideal-point estimates of legislators’ revealed preferences based on cosponsorship data strongly correlate with similar estimates derived from roll-call vote data. Also, cosponsorship activity in the U.S. House has lower dimensionality than cosponsorship has in the Argentine Chamber. We explain this lower discrimination as a function of individual- and district-level factors in both countries. The comparative analysis of legislative voting behavior has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the last decade (Carey 2006; Morgenstern 2004; Sieberer 2006). New statistical techniques and the greater availability of data now allow researchers to map legislative coalitions, explore party discipline, and explain political realignments in multiparty systems (see, for examples, Aleman and Saiegh 2007; Amorim Neto, Cox, and McCubbins 2003; Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004; Desposato 2005; Haspel, Remington, and Smith 1998; Hix, Noury, and Roland 2006; Hug and Schulz 2007; Jones and Hwang 2005a; Londregan 2000; Morgenstern 2004; Poole 2005; and Rosenthal and Voeten 2004). Efforts to understand voting behavior in legislatures across Europe and Latin America not only expand our knowledge about lawmaking and legislative parties, but also promise to shed new light on the forces that shape legislators’ preferences within different institutional contexts. This paper examines the system of Qualified Majority Voting, used by the Council of the European Union, from the perspective of enlargement of the Union. It uses an approach based on power indices due to Penrose (1946), Banzhaf (1965) and Coleman (1971) to make two analyses: (1) the question of the voting power of member countries from the point of view of fairness, and (2) the question of how the threshold number of votes required for QMV should be determined. It studies two scenarios for change from 2005 onwards envisaged by the Nice Treaty: (1) no enlargement, the EU comprising 15 member countries, and (2) full enlargement to 27 members by the accession of all the present twelve candidates. The proposal is made that fair weights be determined algorithmically as a technical or routine matter as the membership changes. The analysis of how the threshold affects power shows the trade-offs that countries face between their blocking power and the power of the Council to act. The main findings are: (1) that the weights laid down in the Nice Treaty are close to being fair, the only significant discrepancies being the under-representation of Germany and Romania, and the over-representation of Spain and Poland; (2) the threshold required for a decision is set too high for the Council to be an effective decision making body. . The members of the European Parliament are elected in nationally organized and domestically oriented polls; however, in the Strasbourg Assembly they form transnational Party Groups or Europarties. The Rules of Procedure require such formations for the functioning of the Assembly, but Party Groups are much more than procedure requisites. They assemble elected representatives of national parties which share a consistent similarity in political ideologies and strategies. Party integration is a decisive development in the unification process of the Western European countries and it is expected to come from the Party Groups experience. The paper analyses such an issue by examining roll-call votes. Data include a systematic sample of votes cast during the first and second elected Parliament. The research looks into two fundamental items: (a) Party Group cohesion (an index of agreement is used to measure it); (b) voting line-ups of Party Groups. The aim is to point out the most important political cleavages and issues of the Community political system. We examined how voting behavior in the European Parliament changed after the European Union added ten new member-states in 2004. Using roll-call votes, we compared voting behavior in the first half of the Sixth European Parliament (July 2004-December 2006) with voting behavior in the previous Parliament (1999–2004). We looked at party cohesion, coalition formation, and the spatial map of voting by members of the European Parliament. We found stable levels of party cohesion and interparty coalitions that formed mainly around the left-right dimension. Ideological distance between parties was the strongest predictor of coalition preferences. Overall, the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 did not change the way politics works inside the European Parliament. We also looked at the specific case of the controversial Services Directive and found that ideology remained the main predictor of voting behavior, although nationality also played a role.