European Political Parties vs. European Parliament Political Groups: The Organizational Implications of their Behavioral and Ideological Balance of Power

The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between the European Parliament Political Groups (EPPGs) and the European Political Parties (EuPPs) in terms of their internal cohesion and in terms of their organizational strength. The European party system has been studied from a variety of point of views: from the seminal works on the cohesion of the EPPGs (Attinà 1990, Hix and Lord 1997) and their degree of competitiveness (Kreppel and Hix 2003) to the representativeness of their members towards the European electorate (Mair and Thomassen 2010, Scully et al. 2012); from the first timid development of the supranational party federations (Bell and Lord 1998) to the development of a true transnational party system (Bardi et al. 2010) just to cite a few. Starting from the the conceptualization of the theory of the “three faces of party organization” (Katz and Mair 1993), one can see that while the study of each face and the relationship between the Party on the Ground (the national parties) and the other two faces has received satisfactory scholarly attention (Ladrech 2007, Whitaker 2011), the relationship between the Party in Public Office (represented by the EPPGs) and the Party in Central Office (the EuPPs) is still understudied. In particular, it is still unclear how the balance of power between the EPPGs and the EuPPs is structured from an organizational point of view and what logics it follows. On this aspect, we argue that there is a strong correlation between the predominance of one actor over the other both in terms of their internal ideological and behavioral unity and of their organizational strength. We employ a series of indicators to measure these aspects. The internal unity of the EPPGs is measured by their voting cohesion, in line with the most diffused literature on the topic (Hix et al. 2006, 2007), while EuPPs’ internal unity is measured by their ideological consistency with the parties they are composed of, using Euromanifesto data (Bressanelli 2012). The comparison of these elements within each “political family” should show how the balance of power may be skewed more towards the EPPG or the relevant EuPP. In a similar fashion, the indicators used to measure the organizational strength of the EPPGs and the EuPPs are their staff, financial resources, and their statutory strength). Similarly, the comparison of these indicators reveals the balance of organizational power between the EPPGs and the EuPPs. Our expectation is that the higher is the dominance of the EPPG from an ideological and behavioral point of view over its related EuPP, the higher is the organizational strength of the group over the party, i.e. the balance of power of organizational strength is usually paired by the same behavioral and ideological strength. We perform this analysis for the last two European Parliament’s legislatures (2009-2014 and available data for the current, 2014-2019) also in order to trace potential changing trends in EPPGs and EuPPs.