Simon Hix

Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and Moravcsik

Giandomenico Majone and Andrew Moravcsik have argued that the EU does not suffer a ‘democratic deficit’. We disagree about one key element: whether a democratic polity requires contestation for political leadership and over policy. This aspect is an essential element of even the ‘thinnest’ theories of democracy, yet is conspicuously absent in the EU.

Dimensions and alignments in european union politics: Cognitive constraints and partisan responses

As the European Union (EU) has evolved, the study agenda has shifted from ‘European integration’ to ‘EU politics’. Missing from this new agenda, however, is an understanding of the ‘cognitive constraints’ on actors and how actors respond, i.e. the shape of the EU ‘political space’ and the location of social groups and competition between actors within this space. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the shape of the EU political space (the interaction between an Integration-Independence and Left- Right dimension and the location of class and sectoral groups within this map), and tests this framework on the policy positions of the Socialist, Christian Democrat and Liberal party leaders between 1976 and 1994 (using the techniques of the ECPR Party Manifestos Group Project). The research finds that the two dimensions were salient across the whole period, explains why the party families converged on pro-European positions by the 1990s and discovers the emergence of a triangular ‘core’ of EU politics.

The study of the European community: The challenge to comparative politics

The theoretical study of the European Community is traditionally conducted by using international relations approaches. However, as the Community has developed ‘an internal political arena’, several approaches have emerged from comparative politics. Contrasting the international relations and comparative politics approaches derived from the same ontological and methodological assumptions suggest that whereas the former (such as neo‐functionalism and intergovernmentalism) may be valid for the analysis of European ‘integration’, comparative politics approaches (such as cooperative federalism, consociationalism, and the Lipset‐Rockan thesis) are more appropriate for the analysis of European Community ‘polities’.

The study of the European Union II: the ‘new governance’ agenda and its rival

ABSTRACT The article reviews the current study of the European Union (EU), where a new agenda is emerging under the umbrella of ‘new governance’. Despite its eclecticism, this agenda argues that the EU is not a state, but is a unique system of non-hierarchical, regulatory and deliberative governance. This agenda also conceptualizes the EU as sui generis, explains its development primarily by (new) institutional theory, and suggests that legitimacy is guaranteed through transparent, pareto-efficient and consensual outputs. Nevertheless, this agenda is open to criticism on empirical, methodological, theoretical and normative levels. Such a dialectic suggests a new duality in the study of the EU: between the new governance approach, and a less developed rival agenda, which treats EU politics and government as not inherently unique, compares the EU to other political systems, explains outcomes through rational strategic action, and suggests that legitimacy can be guaranteed through classic democratic competit...

Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979 2001

How cohesive are political parties in the European Parliament? What coalitions form and why? The answers to these questions are central for understanding the impact of the European Parliament on European Union policies. These questions are also central in the study of legislative behaviour in general. We collected the total population of roll-call votes in the European Parliament, from the first elections in 1979 to the end of 2001 (over 11,500 votes). The data show growing party cohesion despite growing internal national and ideological diversity within the European party groups. We also find that the distance between parties on the left-right dimension is the strongest predictor of coalition patterns. We conclude that increased power of the European Parliament has meant increased power for the transnational parties, via increased internal party cohesion and inter-party competition.

Punishment or Protest? Understanding European Parliament Elections

After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979–2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But these “European effects” are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite the growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding “normal” left-right policy, have much of an effect on electoral outcomes.

Electoral Institutions and Legislative Behavior: Explaining Voting Defection in the European Parliament

Despite a sophisticated understanding of the impact of electoral institutions on macrolevel political behavior, little is known about the relationship between these institutions and microlevel legislative behavior. This article reviews existing claims about this relationship and develops a model for predicting how electoral institutions affect the relationship between parliamentarians and their party principals in the context of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is an ideal laboratory for investigating these effects, because in each European Union member state, different institutions are used to elect Members of European Parliament (MEPs). The results of this model, tested on four hundred thousand individual MEP vote decisions, show that candidate-centered electoral systems (such as open-list proportional representation or single-transferable-vote systems) and decentralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians independent from their party principals. By contrast, party-centered electoral systems (such as closed-list proportional representation systems) and centralized candidate-selection rules produce parliamentarians beholden to the parties that fight elections and choose candidates: in the case of the European Parliament, the national parties.

Legislative Behaviour and Party Competition in the European Parliament: An Application of Nominate to the EU

This article looks at the voting behaviour of Members of the European Parliament in the first year of the 1999–2004 European Parliament. The research applies the Nominate scaling method (developed to map voting in the US Congress) to the 1,031 ‘roll‐call votes’ in the EP in this period. This method enables us to locate each MEP in a multi‐dimensional policy space, and to plot a ‘cutting line’ for each vote. From this information we find that legislative behaviour in the EP is mainly along left—right lines, transnational party group affiliation is more important than national affiliation for determining how MEPs vote, different majority‐commanding coalitions form on different issues, and the difference between the simple majority and absolute majority rules has no effect on the voting behaviour of the two main party groups.

Constitutional agenda-setting through discretion in rule interpretation: why the European Parliament won at Amsterdam

It is a widely accepted that the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam significantly increased the powers of the European Parliament (EP). The critical question, however, is why the European Union (EU) governments did this. I argue, contrary to existing explanations, that these changes came about because the EP was a ‘constitutional agenda-setter’. The rules in the EU Treaty, as established at Maastricht, were incomplete contracts, and the EU governments had imperfect information about the precise operation of the Treaty. As a result, the EP was able to re-interpret these rules to its advantage and threaten not to co-operate with the governments unless they accepted the EPs interpretations. The article shows how this process of discretion, interpretation and acceptance worked in the two main areas of EP power: in the legislative process (in the reform of the co-decision procedure), and in executive appointment (in the reform of the Commission investiture procedure). The article concludes that ‘agenda-setting through discretion in rule interpretation’ is a common story in the development of the powers of parliaments, both at the domestic and EU levels.

After enlargement: voting patterns in the sixth European Parliament

We examined how voting behavior in the European Parliament changed after the European Union added ten new member-states in 2004. Using roll-call votes, we compared voting behavior in the first half of the Sixth European Parliament (July 2004-December 2006) with voting behavior in the previous Parliament (1999–2004). We looked at party cohesion, coalition formation, and the spatial map of voting by members of the European Parliament. We found stable levels of party cohesion and interparty coalitions that formed mainly around the left-right dimension. Ideological distance between parties was the strongest predictor of coalition preferences. Overall, the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 did not change the way politics works inside the European Parliament. We also looked at the specific case of the controversial Services Directive and found that ideology remained the main predictor of voting behavior, although nationality also played a role.