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"Ringe, Nils"
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Who decides, and how? : preferences, uncertainty, and policy choice in the European Parliament
How do individual legislators in the European Parliament (EP) make decisions? Despite a flourishing literature on the European Union's only directly elected institution, we know surprisingly little about the micro-foundations of EP politics. This book's principal argument is that members of the EP (MEPs) make decisions on the basis of perceived preference coherence. When lacking the resources and expertise to make fully informed decisions on most policy proposals, MEPs adopt the positions of those expert colleagues in the responsible legislative committee whose preferences over policy outcomes they perceive to most closely match their own. Given that these preferences are difficult to determine, legislators rely on a shared party label as a stand-in for common preferences. This process results in cohesive party groups not because legislators are “whipped” by their party leadership, but because most MEPs do not know what their preferences and positions ought to be independent of the input provided by their party's policy expert. If nonexpert legislators demand information about how the proposed policy positions relate to their most preferred outcomes, policy experts provide it in the form of focal points, which summarize and evaluate the expected implications of the legislation. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, the book explicitly investigates policy-making processes and outcomes. This not only helps us explain how individual legislators make decisions, it also sheds light on the nature and role of parties and committees in EP politics. “Who Decides, and How?” illustrates how legislators make broadly representative decisions under conditions of resource scarcity, informational uncertainty, and problematic policy preferences.
eBook
Bridging the Information Gap
Legislative member organizations (LMOs)-such as caucuses in the U.S. Congress and intergroups in the European Parliament-exist in lawmaking bodies around the world. Unlike parties and committees, LMOs play no obvious, predefined role in the legislative process. They provide legislators with opportunities to establish social networks with colleagues who share common interests. In turn, such networks offer valuable opportunities for the efficient exchange of policy-relevant-and sometimes otherwise unattainable-information between legislative offices. Building on classic insights from the study of social networks, the authors provide a comparative overview of LMOs across advanced, liberal democracies. In two nuanced case studies of LMOs in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the authors rely on a mix of social network analysis, sophisticated statistical methods, and careful qualitative analysis of a large number of in-depth interviews.
eBook
Policy Preference Formation in Legislative Politics: Structures, Actors, and Focal Points
This article introduces a model of policy preference formation in legislative politics. Emphasizing a dynamic relationship between structure, agent, and decision-making process, it ties the question of policy choice to the dimensionality of the normative and cognitive political space and the strategic actions of parliamentary agenda setters. The model proposes that structural factors, such as ideology, shape policy preferences to the extent that legislative actors successfully link them to specific policy proposals through the strategic provision of focal points. These ideas or images shift attention toward particular aspects of a legislative proposal, thus shaping the dominant interpretation of its content and consequences. This interpretation affects both individual-level policy preferences and policy outcomes. The propositions of the focal-point model are tested empirically in a detailed examination of European Union legislation on cross-border takeover bids, using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
Journal Article
Keeping Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer? Information Networks in Legislative Politics
The authors contribute to the existing literature on the determinants of legislative voting by offering a social network-based theory about the ways that legislators’ social relationships affect floor voting behaviour. It is argued that legislators establish contacts with both political friends and enemies, and that they use the information they receive from these contacts to increase their confidence in their own policy positions. Social contacts between political allies have greater value the more the two allies agree on policy issues, while social contacts between political adversaries have greater value the more the two adversaries disagree on policy issues. To test these propositions, we use social network analysis tools and demonstrate how to account for network dependence using a multilevel modelling approach.
Journal Article
Pinpointing the Powerful: Covoting Network Centrality as a Measure of Political Influence
This article introduces centrality in covoting networks as a measure of influence. Based on a simple cueing dynamic, it conceptualizes those lawmakers as most central—and thus as having the greatest signaling influence—who impact the greatest number of colleagues' voting decisions. A formal proof and an agent-based simulation show that cue-providers are always more central than followers; hence, we can use real-world voting data to identify the most influential legislators. To confirm the measure's construct validity, we predict covoting centrality in the European Parliament and find those factors that are expected to impact legislators' influence to predict their centrality.
Journal Article