Stephen A. Meserve

Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher offices in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how individual, domestic-party, and national-level variables shape the careers available to MEPs and, in turn, their voting choices. To test the argument, we analyze MEPs’ roll-call voting behavior in the 5th session of the EP (1999–2004) using a random effects model that captures idiosyncrasies in voting behavior across both individual MEPs and specific roll-call votes.

Brussels Bound Policy Experience and Candidate Selection in European Elections

Parties in list systems must select candidates to best accomplish their electoral, organizational, and policy goals. In particular, parties must balance nominees’ policy-making potential against other aspects of candidate quality, such as electoral viability. We exploit the unique variation in candidates and parties in European elections to study this trade-off. We develop a statistical ranking model to examine how parties facing varying strategic contexts construct electoral lists and apply it to a novel data set chronicling the political backgrounds of candidates in the 2009 European parliamentary elections. Parties that place high salience on the target legislature, are well positioned to influence policy once in office, and have less access to competing policy-making venues place particular emphasis on institution-specific policy-making experience relative to other types of candidate experience. This systematic variation in parties’ candidate nomination strategies may fundamentally alter legislative output and partisan policy influence.

The internet and state repression: A cross-national analysis of the limits of digital constraint

ABSTRACT Although the internet is an indispensable part of everyday life as well as an essential medium of political discourse, governments may struggle to completely black out their repressive actions. Thus, the internet creates a channel through which domestic dissenters stigmatize their own government for its atrocities using political pressure. Given the potential role of the internet in facilitating negative publicity of state repression, we contend that high internet penetration rates have deterring effects on state repression, strongly conditioned on regime characteristics. We find that the antirepression effects of the internet are greater in democracies, particularly in countries with a high level of constraint on executive decision making and a competitive process of executive selection. Our results suggest that extending internet access to citizens will yield protective effects primarily in those countries with already existing institutional restraints on the government.

Measuring candidate selection mechanisms in European elections: Comparing formal party rules to candidate survey responses:

Students of party organization often rely on politicians’ perceptions when measuring internal party institutions and organizational characteristics. We compare a commonly used survey measure of political parties’ European Parliament candidate selection mechanisms to measures that the authors coded directly from parties’ selection rules. We find substantial disconnect between formal institutions and survey respondent perceptions of selection mechanisms, raising questions about measure accuracy and equivalency. While this divergence may be driven either by distinctions between de jure and de facto selection procedures or by respondent error, we find the differences between the two measures are unsystematic. Our findings suggest that authors studying party characteristics must decide whether their research question calls for survey or formal institutional measures.