Policy Influence and Reelection in the European Parliament

Introduction: In this paper, we undertake two challenges: measuring political influence and using influence to explain reelection. First, we develop a new measure of policy leadership in the European Parliament (EP), by which we mean leadership by lawmakers in particular policy domains. Second, we investigate the predictive power of this new indicator by considering its ability to explain individual MEPs’ reelection. In other words, we ask if policy leaders are more likely to be reelected, controlling for relevant confounding factors, such as formal party and legislative leadership, seniority, and the electoral performance of MEPs’ national parties