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.

Whereas the case study in the previous chapter looked at the power of the European Parliament to control the EU executive, this chapter looks at the power of the parliament to make legislation. We focus on the Takeover Directive, which is one of the most high-profile pieces of legislation ever to pass through the European Parliament. One reason for the public attention to this particular bill was the dramatic tied vote in the third reading in the parliament in July 2001, which meant that the first attempt to pass the legislation failed. But even without such an unusual event, the Takeover Directive represented a major piece of EU regulation because it aimed to establish common European-wide rules governing shareholders’ rights and defensive measures in the event of takeover bids. The bill consequently addressed one of the central differences between the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Rhenish’ models of capitalism.

To test our argument in this case the chapter is organised as follows. Section 11.1 presents a short history of the Takeover Directive, from its origins in the 1970s to its eventual adoption in April 2004. Section 11.2 then discusses some descriptive evidence of how MEPs voted in three key votes on the legislation, and the findings of the existing research on the passage of this directive in the European Parliament. In Section 11.3 we undertake a statistical analysis of MEP voting behaviour in these three votes. Section 11.4 contains a brief conclusion.

We have so far excluded two possible explanations of growing party cohesion in the European Parliament. First, we found in Chapter 5 that parties have not become more cohesive and more competitive as a result of growing internal ideological homogeneity. Second, we found in Chapter 6 that growing party cohesion cannot be explained only by strategic control of the legislative agenda inside the European Parliament. There is genuine enforcement of party discipline.

However, there are at least two other possible explanations as to why disciplined party politics has emerged in the European Parliament. One is that the European political groups are able to force their MEPs to vote together, irrespective of the MEPs’ personal preferences or the preferences of the MEPs’ national parties. Another is that the national political parties that make up the European parties strategically choose to vote together and impose discipline on their MEPs even when their preferences diverge. At face value, these explanations might seem similar, in that in both cases national delegations of MEPs appear to be voting against their expressed preferences under pressure from the European political groups. However, they are in fact different. The first explanation assumes that the national political parties are acting involuntarily, while the second assumes that national political parties are acting voluntarily upon some strategic objective, such as a long-term collective policy goal rather than the immediate outcome of a particular vote. The first explanation is top-down while the second one is bottom-up.

We have analysed in this book for the first time all roll-call votes by MEPs in the five elected European Parliaments since 1979. This research has delivered important insights both from the point of view of political science in general and from the point of view of the study of European Union institutions.

The European Parliament is a unique object of study. It has elected representatives from all the main party families in Europe (conservatives, socialists, liberals, greens, variants of the extreme left and extreme right as well as anti-Europeans) from a growing number of countries (9 in 1979, 10 since 1981, 12 since 1986, 15 since 1995, and 25 since 2004). It has the potential to be the most fragmented parliament in the world. Studying the European Parliament is a good test of two opposing views of democracy: the citizen-delegate view on the one hand, according to which fragmentation is desirable because it allows a close connection between representatives and their home constituency; and the party-based view on the other, according to which it is desirable for elected representatives to group into disciplined political parties. The European Parliament clearly follows the model of party-based democracy.

In its young life, the European Parliament has evolved quickly towards a robust party system, as has been the case in the history of most legislatures. The European Parliament is a particularly interesting case to study the formation of a party system.

In the late 1950s, moved by the hope for peace and economic prosperity in Europe, six governments constructed the foundations of an unprecedented form of supranational governance: the European Community. Heads of governments negotiated the rules and organizations that would govern what was largely an international economic agreement. Interest groups and civil society were not directly involved in these negotiations and public interest issues were not on the agenda.

Today, in the year 2006, this same supranational space – the European Union (EU) – possesses an ever-expanding net of public policies, including women's rights and environmental protection. These policy areas have consistently been guarded by national governments, who have been hesitant to let the EU legislate in the area of national social policy and environmental preservation. Today, public interests groups and civil society – from feminist activists to environmental groups – and increasingly powerful EU organizations, such as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) – are equally present in this supranational policy arena. Individuals possess enforceable rights under EU law and public interest groups are now permanent participants in EU policy processes. This book explains how this remarkable transformation took place – how an international treaty governing economic cooperation became a quasi-constitutional polity granting individual rights and public inclusion. I argue that the ECJ and civil society were integral to this transformation.

This book examines the emergence and evolution of supranational governance in Europe.