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Partners in Times of Crisis: A Quantitative Analysis of Party Cohesion in the European Parliament before and after Brexit

Political Parties
Decision Making
Voting Behaviour
Brexit
European Parliament
Costanza Marcellino
LUISS University
Marc Hooghe
KU Leuven
Costanza Marcellino
LUISS University

Abstract

Ever since the implementation of the Single European Act and the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties at the end of the 1990s, the impact and power of the European Parliament (EP) on decision-making have increased significantly. This has gradually enhanced the strength of transnational parties and has bridged the gap of “electoral connection” between EU legislators and public preferences. While numerous studies have explored the voting behaviour of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) along with trends of party cohesion, party competition and coalition formation among European party families (EPGs), little scholarly attention has been paid to test the robustness of these party consistencies during critical time points. The intense debate on Brexit can be considered as a stress test for the coherence of European political parties, and the impact of this crisis on their internal coherence still remains unknown. Thus, to address this research gap, this paper will address the questions “How did intra EP party cohesion change after the occurrence of Brexit?” and “To what extent did the UK’s national party affiliation influence British MEPs’ legislative behaviour before and after the Brexit referendum?”. By relying on Simon Hix’ Agreement Index (AI) design for measuring party cohesion and employing EP roll-call votes data from 2004-2022 by VoteWatch Europe, this study will provide a systematic overview of the trends of EU intra-party cohesion across time, countries and policy areas through descriptive and fixed-effects regression analyses. Given the significant challenge posed by UK’s decision to leave the Union, this project contributes to the existing research on party cohesion and competition first by examining coherence within European parties before and after the Brexit crisis, secondly by offering a comparative analysis between EU member states’ trends and the UK’s across the relevant policy areas, and lastly by estimating the impact of the interplay between national and supranational party interests when determining parties’ loyalty. The nature of the study will additionally shed light on the importance of Eurosceptic patterns at the European party level, thus determining in what countries European integration is most likely to occur as a wedge issue.