Aggregation and Representation in the European Parliament Party Groups

While members of the European Parliament are elected in national constituencies, their votes are determined by the aggregation of MEPs in multinational party groups. The uncoordinated aggregation of national party programmes in multinational EP party groups challenges theories of representation based on national parties and parliaments. This article provides a theoretical means of understanding representation by linking the aggregation of dozens of national party programmes in different EP party groups to the aggregation of groups to produce the parliamentary majority needed to enact policies. Drawing on an original data source of national party programmes, the EU Profiler, the article shows that the EP majorities created by aggregating MEP votes in party groups are best explained by cartel theories. These give priority to strengthening the EP’s collective capacity to enact policies rather than voting in accord with the programmes they were nationally elected to represent

The mobilising effect of political choice

Political choice is central to citizens’ participation in elections. Nonetheless, little is known about the individual-level mechanisms that link political choice and turnout. It is argued in this article that turnout decisions are shaped not only by the differences between the parties (party polarisation), but also by the closeness of parties to citizens’ own ideological position (congruence), and that congruence matters more in polarised systems where more is at stake. Analysing cross-national survey data from 80 elections, it is found that both polarisation and congruence have a mobilising effect, but that polarisation moderates the effect of congruence on turnout. To further explore the causal effect of political choice, the arrival of a new radical right-wing party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is leveraged and the findings show that the presence of the AfD had a mobilising effect, especially for citizens with congruent views

Policy competition in the 2002 French legislative and presidential elections

The French two-round system of presidential elections forces candidates to choose strategies designed to maximize their votes in two different, potentially conflicting strategic contexts: a first round contest between many candidates, and a second round between (typically) a left- and a right-oriented candidate. Following a constitutional change in 2000, furthermore, presidential elections are synchronized with legislative elections, more tightly linking presidential candidates to the policy platforms of the parties they represent. This article examines the consequences of policy positioning by presidential candidates, measuring, comparing and assessing positioning in the legislative elections and in the first and second presidential election rounds. The measures come from an expert survey taken in 2002, from content analysis of party manifestos and presidential speeches, and from the 2002 French National Election Survey. The findings provide hard empirical confirmation of two commonly perceived propositions: first, that Jospin's first-round loss resulted from strategic error in moving too close to the policy centre, and second, that Chirac's won an overwhelming second-round victory because he collected all of the voters from candidates eliminated in the first round

Responding to the crisis: Eurosceptic parties of the left and right and their changing position towards the European Union

At the time of the election of the European Parliament (EP) in 2014, the European Union (EU) was heavily affected by a multifaceted crisis that had – and still has – far‐reaching implications for the political system of its member countries, but also for the European level of governance. Against the background of the strong Eurosceptic vote in the 2014 EP elections, this study aims to investigate in which way Eurosceptic parties of the left and the right respond to the multiple crises of the EU. Using data from the Euromanifesto Project from 2004/2009 and 2014, changes in the party positions towards the EU are analysed in the shadow of the multiple crises and the reasons thereof are explored. The findings show a general anti‐European shift among the two types of Eurosceptic parties. Nevertheless, the changes in the EU polity tone are not determined by issue‐based repercussions of the multiple crises, but by the EU‐related evaluation – the polity mood – of the national citizenry. For far‐right Eurosceptic parties, the shift is moderated by the level of public support for EU integration in their national environment. Among far‐left Eurosceptic parties, by contrast, it is moderated by the more specific public attitudes about the monetary union policy of the EU. Consequently, political parties when drafting their manifestos for EP elections are not so much guided by the objective severity of political problems or by the evaluations of these problems by the citizenry. What matters in the end is the link that citizens themselves are able to establish between the severity of political problems, on the one hand, and the responsibility of the EU for these problems on the other. This has important consequences for understanding of the nature and substance of political responsiveness within the EU system of multilevel governance