Bjørn Høyland

Parties in the Council

Ideology is widely seen as a powerful explanatory force of behaviour in collective decision-making. Yet, research on the Council of the European Union, the chief legislative body in the European Union, has only recently started to pay attention to ideology. We investigate to what extent formal position-taking can be explained by the ideological party affiliation of the governing parties. The focus is twofold. First, can aggregated coalition patterns be explained by ideological party affiliation? Second, do countries change coalition partners when there is a change of parties in government?

Allocation of Codecision Reports in the Fifth European Parliament

This article argues that MEPs from national parties represented in the Council of Ministers are more active as rapporteurs on Codecision legislation than MEPs from national parties not represented in the Council. EP rapporteurs can be thought of as informed actors offering non-binding advice to the EP plenary. Expert committees and the Council presidency play a similar role in the Council. Compared with rapporteurs from parties not represented in the Council, EP rapporteurs from parties represented in the Council may incur lower costs in coordinating their proposals with the informed actors in the Council. If this is the case, they should be more interested in writing Codecision reports than are MEPs from parties not represented in the Council. This possibility is investigated using a data set consisting of all Codecision legislation initiated by the Commission between 1999 and 2004.

Bicameral Politics in the European Union

The literature on legislative decision-making and bargaining in the EU has reached a common conclusion that the European Parliament (Parliament) and the Council of the European Union (Council) are on an equal footing in the main legislative procedure, the co-decision procedure. We present theoretical and empirical evidence to suggest that this is not the case. First, our analysis of the formal rules reveals that the Council has conditional agenda-setting power due to a change in the majority thresholds for adopting legislation from the first to the second reading in the Parliament. This change has important implications for the internal dynamics of the Parliament and its institutional powers vis-a-vis the Council. Testing these analytical considerations of the formal decision rules against voting data on all co-decision legislation adopted in the two institutions between 1999 and 2004, our empirical findings show that: first, from 1999 to 2004 coalition formation in the Council fell predominantly along the traditional left–right political dimensions when negotiating co-decision proposals. Second, when disagreement over legislation is recorded in the Council, a strong divide can also be found in the Parliament. Third, when the Parliament is divided along party political lines, it is less likely to be able to meet the absolute majority requirement for amending the proposal adopted by the Council. Lastly, Parliament amendments are most likely to be adopted when a decision by voting is requested by a party group associated with the main ideological contingency in the Council.

Legislative Involvement in Parliamentary Systems: Opportunities, Conflict, and Institutional Constraints

In parliamentary systems, the need to preserve the political agreement that sustains the executive often motivates legislative involvement in policymaking. Institutional arrangements regulating executive–legislative relations and ministerial autonomy also structure parliamentary participation. However, empirical evidence of these effects remains limited to a few policies and countries. European Union legislation provides the opportunity to test expectations about legislative involvement for different types of measure across various institutional arrangements, across multiple policy areas, and across time. In this article, we investigate legislative involvement in the transposition of 724 directives in 15 member states from 1978 to 2004. Our results confirm that involvement increases as conflict between the responsible minister and her coalition partners intensifies. The discretionary scope embedded in the directive further inflates this effect. Additionally, parliamentary involvement decreases as the governments institutional advantage over the legislature increases, especially if intracoalitional conflict deepens.

Forum section: an automated database of the European Parliament

We present an automatically updatable database of background information about Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from 1979 until the present. Although this information is already directly accessible through the European Parliament’s web page, it is presented in a manner that makes it ideal only for those interested in finding information about individual MEPs, but difficult for anyone interested in doing large-N analysis. We provide an online ‘live’ source of background information about MEPs that is tailored towards the need of the latter group. Our web page allows researchers to specify the time period in which they are interested and to obtain data on committee, party group and delegation membership, as well as leadership positions within seconds. As the collection of the data is fully automated, we are able to keep the data updated as long as the European Parliament (EP) continues its current practice of making background information about members available online. Researchers will be able to combine this information with other data sources at a substantively lower cost than is currently the case. As such, we hope to encourage a new generation of research into the EP. The research note is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literature. It highlights how our database may be used to extend the already extensive quantitative literature on the EP. The second section gives the reader an overview of how the technology behind the database works and how to access the information. We leave the technical aspects of the principles behind the data collection scripts to the web appendix. The third section describes the database.

Selection and Sanctioning in European Parliamentary Elections

Elections are inherently about selecting good candidates for public office and sanctioning incumbents for past performance. Yet, in the low salience context of ‘second-order elections’ to the European Parliament, empirical evidence suggests that voters sanction first-order national incumbents. However, no previous study has examined whether voters also use these elections to select good candidates. This article draws on a unique dataset on the political experience of party representatives in eighty-five national elections to the European Parliament to evaluate the extent to which voters prefer candidates with more political experience. The results show that selection considerations do matter. Parties that choose experienced top candidates are rewarded by voters. This effect is greatest when European elections are held in the middle of the national electoral cycle.

Procedural and party effects in European Parliament roll-call votes

I extend the standard spatial model of legislative voting to account for vote-specific party inducements and procedural differences. Focusing on voting in the 1999—2004 European Parliament, I find evidence of vote-specific party inducements in a large share of the roll call votes. Furthermore, MEPs position themselves differently across procedures. As most roll call votes are taken on non-legislative votes, these estimates may overemphasize voting pattern on these votes and downplay voting pattern on legislative votes. As such, these estimates may be a poorly suited for studying within party heterogeneity on legislative votes.

Legislative Voting in the Canadian Parliament

We analyze legislative votes in the 35 th (1994-97) and 38 th (200405) Canadian Parliaments over a multidimensional policy space. The results demonstrate that policy debates are two-dimensional in Canada. The first dimension represents the division between governing and opposition parties that has been found in similar parliamentary systems. The second dimension captures the opposition between Quebec and western provinces. There is a clear regional division between the Reform Party (and later the Conservative Party) and the Bloc Quebecois in both Parliaments; whereas the Liberals and the NDP occupy the center on this legislative dimension. We also note that the newly formed Conservative Party has moved closer to the center in the 38 th Parliament.

Simplifying the parallelization of scientific codes by a function-centric approach in Python

The purpose of this paper is to show how existing scientific software can be parallelized using a separate thin layer of Python code where all parallelization-specific tasks are implemented. We provide specific examples of such a Python code layer, which can act as templates for parallelizing a wide set of serial scientific codes. The use of Python for parallelization is motivated by the fact that the language is well suited for reusing existing serial codes programmed in other languages. The extreme flexibility of Python with regard to handling functions makes it very easy to wrap up decomposed computational tasks of a serial scientific application as Python functions. Many parallelization-specific components can be implemented as generic Python functions, which may take as input those wrapped functions that perform concrete computational tasks. The overall programming effort needed by this parallelization approach is limited, and the resulting parallel Python scripts have a compact and clean structure. The usefulness of the parallelization approach is exemplified by three different classes of application in natural and social sciences.

Issue-Specific Policy-Positions and Voting in the Council

Politics in the Council is Janus-faced. There is bargaining with identifiable winners and losers, yet the voting records show high levels of agreement. These two sides have almost exclusively been studied in isolation even though standard theoretical models of voting typically assume that actors’ behaviour is guided by their positions relative to the proposal and the status quo. By combining positional data and voting data, we evaluate to what extent voting is driven by salience-weighted issue-specific positions. Our results show that governments’ voting behaviour is guided by their issue-specific positions. The relationship between preference-based positions and votes is stronger when we impute values for the missing positions in the positional data. This illustrates the importance of cautious treatment of missing data in EU decision-making.