Introduction

Irrespective of how favorable the breeding ground and the political opportunity structure might be to new political parties, they merely present political actors with a series of possibilities. In the end, it is still up to the populist radical right parties to profit from them. In line with scholarship on political parties in general, populist radical right parties should no longer be seen simply as “hapless victims of their economic or demographic environments, but as … the active shapers of their own fates” (Berman 1997: 102; also Sartori 1990). In other words, the party itself should be included as a major factor in explaining its electoral success and failure.

The strategies of contemporary populist radical right parties are part of almost every account of the party family. Nearly every scholar points to the importance of the “modern image” of populist radical right parties. Indeed, image production by these parties has generated some marvelously creative terminology, including “Haiderization” to designate the process (Marcus 2000: 36) and “designer fascism” in reference to the final product (Wolin 1998). This process of “restyling” is often believed to be only superficial, involving mainly the selection of physically attractive representatives, such as former beauty queens and (young) men in tailor-made suits, rather than a genuine transformation of the ideology and style of the parties.

Introduction

“Globalization” is undoubtedly one of the most overused words of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. According to its proponents, all things good are the direct consequence of globalization, while its opponents link all things evil to that same phenomenon. Consequently, globalization seems so omnipresent that one struggles to comprehend its meaning. This is not helped by the fact that the term is more easily used than defined. Many academic and nonacademic observations obscure both the meaning and the significance of the phenomenon.

Conceptual precision notwithstanding, political actors clearly perceive globalization as one of the most significant phenomena in European politics of the twenty-first century. It is not surprising that globalization is also linked to the populist radical right, one of the other most debated developments in contemporary European politics. Summarizing very crudely, the two are connected in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, globalization is seen as one of the main causes of the recent electoral success of populist radical right parties in Europe (see chapter 9). On the other hand, populist radical right parties are among the most vocal opponents of globalization. The latter aspect, which so far has received scant attention in the literature (Dechezelles 2004; Leggewie 2003; Simmons 2003), will be addressed in this chapter.

In this chapter, our aim is to provide some essential background material for understanding the argument and evidence we present in the rest of the book. We focus on three aspects of the story of the European Parliament: (1) the main powers of the institution and how these have changed; (2) how the political parties and the party system in the European Parliament have evolved; and (3) why the ‘electoral connection’ from citizens to MEPs remains rather weak despite six rounds of European Parliament elections. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ‘roll-call votes’ in the European Parliament, which is the data we use in the rest of the book to understand how politics inside the European Parliament has changed. Roll-call votes are votes where the voting decision of each MEP is recorded. The roll-call voting records are published in the annexes to the minutes of the plenary sessions of the European Parliament. Nowadays, they can also be found on the website of the European Parliament.

1.1 Powers of the European Parliament

The precursor to the modern European Parliament was the ‘Assembly’ of the European Coal and Steel Community, which held its first meeting on 10 September 1952.

Following the reform of the Commission investiture procedure by the Maastricht Treaty, as described in Chapter 1, on 21 July 1994 the European Parliament voted for the first time on the choice of a Commission President, and backed Jacques Santer by a narrow margin. Many MEPs, mostly on the left, were reluctant to support Santer. This was partly because they disagreed with his policy agenda (as a Christian democrat politician) and partly because they were unhappy with the way the nomination process had been conducted by the European Council. So, when the Commission was later accused of gross mismanagement, many MEPs who had originally opposed Santer now found the ideal opportunity to challenge his legitimacy. The Commission survived two censure votes before resigning en masse in March 1999, just before a likely loss in the third censure vote.

The story of the Santer Commission is a revealing case of how the European Parliament exercises its executive-control powers. This case also enables us to test whether our argument, which holds for a large number of votes across a long time period, also explains MEP behaviour when there are high political stakes. If democratic politics exists in the European Parliament, then the positions of the European parties should make a difference, and the left–right dimension should structure MEP behaviour, regardless of whether the parliament is voting on a minor non-legislative resolution or on a Commission censure motion.

If we follow the reasoning from Chapter 2, a strong party system requires that parties are cohesive, in other words that the elected members of the same party vote in a disciplined way, following the position reached by their party leaders in the parliament. A political party will attract support by making commitments to particular policies or goals that are distinct from the commitments of other parties. If a party is able to work as a highly organised team, it will be able to turn these promises into policy outcomes. If a party is not able to ‘rally its troops’, it will have little chance of shaping policy outcomes, and so will leave its supporters disappointed. Scholars of the EU have hence argued that for transnational parties to increase the democratic accountability of the EU they must be able to act cohesively to implement the policy platforms they announce (e.g. Attinà, 1992; Andeweg, 1995; Hix and Lord, 1997). If voting in the European Parliament breaks down along national lines rather than party lines, the transnational political groups cannot claim to be able to articulate the classic ideological viewpoints in the EU policy-making process with any real degree of effectiveness. Testing for the cohesiveness of parties is the first natural step towards understanding the effectiveness of parties. As in the previous chapter, where we looked at the long-run and short-run determinants of participation, we analyse in this chapter the long-run determinants of cohesion.

One of the main ways of understanding politics inside legislative institutions is to investigate the shape of the policy space. The number of policy dimensions and the location of actors on these dimensions determine, among other things, which actors are pivotal and the possibility and direction of policy change (e.g. Tsebelis, 2002). Not surprisingly, a fast growing area of political science research in recent years has been the estimation of actors' ideal points. This has taken a variety of forms and methods, such as scaling of roll-call voting data (e.g. Poole and Rosenthal, 1997), hand coding of party manifestos (Budge et al., 2001), surveys of experts' opinions of parties' positions (e.g. Laver and Hunt, 1992), or computer coding of political statements (e.g. Laver et al., 2003).

The European Parliament is an especially interesting object for spatial analysis of the dimensionality of politics because of its unique features. There is considerable heterogeneity between the cultures, histories, economic conditions and national institutions of the EU member states. Therefore, politics in the European Parliament is likely to be more complex than politics in many national parliaments. MEPs are also members of national parties as well as European political groups. A legislature with such characteristics is potentially one with high dimensionality.

In this chapter we describe the policy space inside the European Parliament by applying an established scaling method to the roll-call votes between 1979 and 2004.

Competition between political parties is often considered to be central to modern democracy (e.g. Schumpeter, 1943). Competition provides citizens with a mechanism for choosing leaders and policies and for punishing elected officials for failing to hold to their promises or for being corrupt. Competition provides incentives for elites to develop rival policy ideas and propose rival candidates for office. Democratic contestation can also have a formative effect. In both America and in European countries, the operation of competitive party systems played a central role in the replacement of local identities by national identities (e.g. Key, 1961; Rokkan, 1999).

Political parties, however, are not inherently competitive. For example, in the 1950s Schattschneider (1960), among others, criticised American parties for being ‘unresponsive’ to voters concerns and for failing to ‘mobilise’ around different policy agendas. Similarly, Katz and Mair (1995) famously observed that in many democracies, instead of competing, the main parties now form a ‘cartel’ to secure government office and state funding of their activities.

Similarly, a widely held view of the European Parliament is that the two main political parties, the socialists and the EPP, tend to collude rather than compete for influence and compete over policy outcomes (cf. Kreppel, 2000, 2002b; Hix et al., 2003). These two parties share similar policy preferences on many issues on the EU agenda, such as the social-market model of European regulatory capitalism and further European integration (e.g. Marks and Wilson, 2000).

In the previous chapter we argued that when there are transaction costs to policy-making it is better to have strong parties. The discussion was silent, however, about the dimensions along which these parties should form. In democratic systems we are used to thinking of parties as located along a left–right axis, though other dimensions sometimes play a minor role. But we did not discuss why parties should necessarily form along the left–right dimension.

Parties could conceivably form around any set of policy issues or societal interests. Parties could, for example, form along territorial lines instead of socio-economic lines. In the case of the European Parliament, parties based on the national/territorial divisions between the EU member states might even seem more natural than parties based on transnational ideological interests or values. Uninformed outsiders often assume that voting in the parliament follows national lines, for example with the French conservatives voting more with the French socialists than with the Scandinavian conservatives. Indeed, the dominant public perception is that EU politics is about conflicts between countries: for example, ‘Britain’ opposes qualified-majority voting on taxation, ‘France’ opposes further reductions in agricultural spending and ‘Denmark’ wants higher environmental standards. This perception is largely based on debates in the European Council, where only the heads of state and government are represented, which means that any differences of positions necessarily appear to be between member states rather than ideologies.

A common misconception is that MEPs are ‘part-time’ politicians who are highly paid but rarely show up at plenary sessions. Part of this misconception stems from the fact that the European Parliament's plenary sessions only last for one week each month. However, MEPs do much more than speak and vote in plenary sessions. The average month of an MEP involves a week of committee meetings in Brussels, a week of party meetings in Brussels, a plenary week in Strasbourg or Brussels debating and voting on legislation and resolutions, and a week ‘back home’ dealing with constituency and other local political business. Shuttling between Brussels, Strasbourg and home, MEPs ‘live out of a suitcase’. Moreover, the constant shuttles of the MEPs are associated with moves of tons of documents that are needed for the normal operation of the European Parliament. Seen this way, it is as if MEPs are moving offices twice a month. It is thus not too surprising that most MEPs only serve for one five-year term.

Another aspect of this misconception stems from the common observation that even in the plenary sessions not all MEPs take part in all votes. However, like all elected politicians, MEPs have to make choices about how best to allocate their time: for example, whether to work on a committee report, prepare a speech, meet with interest groups or constituents, attend a party meeting, undertake research, attend a committee meeting, attend a plenary debate and speak in the plenary.

In the previous chapter we discussed long-term trends in party cohesion and found that increased powers to the European Parliament had led to increased cohesion of parties. Here we focus on the short-run determinants of cohesion and look at the characteristics of particular votes: how important they are, who sets the agenda and for what purpose, and so on.

As discussed in the previous chapter, there are several competing explanations of why parliamentary parties are cohesive. If the members of the party share the same preferences over policy, then on most issues these members will vote together naturally, without the need for any additional pressure or incentives from the party leadership. We found evidence that, despite increased ideological diversity (as a result of expansion of most of the groups to new parties from the existing member states and new member states), voting cohesion has increased and not decreased, suggesting that preferences alone cannot explain cohesion. We presented evidence that suggests that the explanation of cohesion based on the idea that the members of the political groups in the European Parliament have homogeneous a priori preferences does not hold. We showed, for example, that growing internal ideological diversity in the political groups had no negative effect on the cohesion of the groups.

Figure 6.1 illustrates the difference between policy preferences of MEPs and their voting behaviour.

Early social scientists, like Moisei Ostrogoski, Robert Michels, Lord Bryce and Max Weber, became interested in the relationship between democracy and political parties with the onset of democratic politics in Europe at the start of the twentieth century. It would be impossible and inappropriate for us to review all the work done on this subject in the ensuing century. As a short-cut, we start the discussion in this chapter by identifying two contemporary accounts of democratic politics that have very different conceptions about the role of political parties. The comparison of these two views will help in presenting our positions.

A first view emphasises that elected representatives mainly defend their constituencies' interests. In this view, a parliament is likely to be fragmented into the many constituencies that are represented within its walls. The smaller the size of the constituencies (the electoral districts) the better it is for democracy since smaller and more homogeneous groups can be better defended by their representatives. According to the same logic, the position of the elected representatives should be as close as possible to their constituencies' interests. Parties should, on the contrary, be seen with suspicion because they tend to create a distance between elected representatives and the citizens. We call this view ‘citizen-delegate democracy’.

The second view considers that strong parties are fundamental for the good functioning of democracy. Parties are the natural intermediary between voters and the democratic decision-making process.

On 27 October 2004 the European Parliament refused to elect the new Commission, the European Union (EU) executive. There was no vote, as 10 minutes before the vote the Commission President designate, José Manuel Durão Barroso, announced that he was withdrawing his team of Commissioners.