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"Hix, Simon"
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The political system of the European Union
The EU is presented in this textbook as an emerging political system, in which the government, policies and the politics of the system are inextricably linked.
BOOK
The Rise and Fall of Social Democracy, 1918–2017
We describe the electoral history of one of Europe’s most successful party families over the past 100 years in 31 countries. With a unique and newly collected dataset of national election results and a large number of economic and social variables measured for each country-election observation, we find that two main factors drive the electoral performance of social democratic parties: public-sector spending and the size of the manufacturing sector. Our findings suggest that most of the fall in support for social democratic parties in recent years is correlated with a decline in the number of industrial workers as well as a reduction in the propensity of social democratic parties’ core supporters (industrial workers and public-sector employees) to vote for them.
Journal Article
Punishment or Protest? Understanding European Parliament Elections
After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979–2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But these “European effects” are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite the growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding “normal” left-right policy, have much of an effect on electoral outcomes.
Journal Article
Electoral Institutions and Legislative Behavior: Explaining Voting Defection in the European Parliament
Despite a sophisticated understanding of the impact of electoral institutions on macrolevel political behavior, little is known about the relationship between these institutions and microlevel legislative behavior. This article reviews existing claims about this relationship and develops a model for predicting how electoral institutions affect the relationship between parliamentarians and their party principals in the context of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is an ideal laboratory for investigating these effects, because in each European Union member state, different institutions are used to elect Members of European Parliament (MEPs). The results of this model, tested on four hundred thousand individual MEP vote decisions, show that candidate-centered electoral systems (such as open-list proportional representation or single-transferable-vote systems) and decentralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians independent from their party principals. By contrast, party-centered electoral systems (such as closed-list proportional representation systems) and centralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians beholden to the parties that fight elections and choose candidates: in the case of the European Parliament, the national parties.
Journal Article
Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures
This study uses roll-call voting data from 16 legislatures to investigate how the institutional context of politics—such as whether a country is a parliamentary or presidential regime, or has a single-party, coalition or minority government—shapes coalition formation and voting behavior in parliaments. It uses a geometric scaling metric to estimate the “revealed space” in each of these legislatures and a vote-by-vote statistical analysis to identify how much of this space can be explained by government-opposition dynamics as opposed to parties’ (left-right) policy positions. Government-opposition interests, rather than parties’ policy positions, are found to be the main drivers of voting behavior in most institutional contexts. In contrast, issue-by-issue coalition building along a single policy dimension is only found under certain restrictive institutional constraints: presidential regimes with coalition governments or parliamentary systems with minority governments. Put another way, voting in most legislatures is more like Westminster than Washington.
Journal Article
Power versus Ideology: Political Group Switching in the European Parliament
Why do legislators switch party? We seek to identify whether “party switching” is mainly determined by power (to join a more influential party) or ideology (to join a party with closer policy goals). We focus on the 557 cases of political group switching in the European Parliament between 1979 and 2014. We find that most of these cases were from smaller, more marginal, and oppositional groups, to larger, more pivotal, and governing groups. Nevertheless, we also find that ideological congruence (between an MEP and his or her prospective group) was an important determinant of political group switching.
Journal Article
Voting patterns and alliance formation in the European Parliament
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have voluntarily formed transnational political groups and invariably follow the voting instructions of these groups. This is intriguing as there are few obvious incentives for doing so. Unlike national parties, for example, the political groups in the European Parliament are not punished by the electorate if they are divided on key issues, as citizens know very little about what goes on inside the European Parliament. This paper pieces together an explanation of why the European political groups exist and why they have become so powerful by looking at the determinants of group cohesion and by undertaking a spatial analysis of voting in the European Parliament. MEPs who share preferences on a range of issues on the European Union policy agenda have an incentive to establish a division-of-labour contract and to share the costs of collecting information. Once internal party policy specialization and agenda setting has been established, MEPs have incentives to follow the voting instructions of their group owing to the advantages of cohesion in a context of repeated voting.
Journal Article
Legislative Activity and Gridlock in the European Union
This article develops a game-theoretical model of European Union (EU) policy making that suggests that the amount of legislative activity depends on the size of the gridlock interval. This is consistent with Krehbiel's study of US politics. This interval depends on two factors: (1) the preference configuration of the political actors and (2) the legislative procedures used in a particular period. Actors’ preferences and procedures are not expected to have any effect beyond their impact on the gridlock interval. The study predicts smaller gridlock intervals, and thus more legislative activity, under the co-decision (consultation) procedure when the pivotal member states and the European Parliament (Commission) are closer to each other. More activity is expected under qualified majority voting in the Council than under unanimity. The results find support for these propositions in an empirical analysis of EU legislative activity between 1979 and 2009.
Journal Article
For and Against Brexit: A Survey Experiment of the Impact of Campaign Effects on Public Attitudes toward EU Membership
What are the lessons of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) regarding the effects of message framing? This article reports findings from an innovative online survey experiment based on a two-wave panel design. The findings show that, despite the expectation that campaign effects are generally small for high-salience issues – such as Brexit – the potential for campaign effects was high for the pro-EU frames. This suggests that within an asymmetrical information environment – in which the arguments for one side of an issue (anti-EU) are ‘priced in’, while arguments for the other side (pro-EU) have been understated – the potential for campaign effects in a single direction are substantial. To the extent that this environment is reflected in other referendum campaigns, the potential effect of pro-EU frames may be substantial.
Journal Article
Parliamentary Behavior with Two Principals: Preferences, Parties, and Voting in the European Parliament
The European Parliament has become one of the most powerful institutions in the European Union. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) can now enact legislation, amend the European Union budget, veto the nominee for the European Union Commission President, and censure the Commission. But, we know little about what determines MEPs' voting behavior. Do they vote according to their personal policy preferences? Do the EP parties force MEPs to toe the party line? And, when national party and EP party preferences conflict, which way do MEPs respond-to the principals who control their election (the national parties) or the principals who control their influence in the EP (the EP parties)? The results reported here show that national party policies are the strongest predictors of voting behavior in the EP.
Journal Article