Party Group Loyalty and National Interests in EU Climate Policy Making

There is a long tradition of scholarship arguing that the EU has an in-built and self-reinforcing mechanism which facilitates ´races to the top´ among member states and EU institutions leading to increased climate policy ambitions. In this context, the European Parliament has often been regarded as the key facilitator of the deepening and widening of climate and energy policies within the EU. Since its onset, the European Parliament has been to a surprising extent a ´normal parliament´. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have largely voted based on their left-right ideological positions and have demonstrated strong loyalty to European Parliamentary groups (EPG) rather than to their national interests. Focusing on climate and energy policy, in this paper, we are interested when MEPs defect from their EPGs political line. Our analysis combines national level party manifestos, Euromanifestos and roll call data from the EP. Our analysis tests the hypothesis that parties showing a low salience for climate issues are the ones supporting the majority position of their political group and approve EU energy and climate policy.