Coalition Parties in EU Lawmaking: Voting in the EP to Prevent Ministerial Drift

• In Event: (European) Parliament Funkadelic

Abstract

Coalition governments are frequently faced with issues arising from diverging goals among coalition parties. The effects of such conflict on policy-making in conjunction with delegation of policy-making tasks have been studied extensively in the domestic context. Yet, we know relatively little about how these dynamics play out within the EU. In this paper, I argue that overt intra-coalition disagreement in roll call votes in the European Parliament (EP) serves as a safeguard against ministerial drift in the Council of the EU. By dissenting publicly, coalition parties make their disagreement hard to ignore for compatriot ministers in the Council. However, public disagreement may be exploited by ministers from other member states, thereby producing costs for the overall bargaining strength of the government in the Council. I thus argue that coalition parties use this strategy sparingly unless they are more aligned with other member states in the Council than with their own minister. Moreover, when available, coalition parties should prefer internal or domestic institutions to overt dissent for enforcing the coalition compromise and preventing ministerial drift. I present a formal model of coalition parties' choice to dissent from their partners in the EP. Examining roll call votes in the 7th and 8th term of the EP (2009-2018), the paper illustrates that the empirical findings align with the predictions of the model. These findings hold significant implications for our understanding of coalition policy-making, bargaining theory and EU politics.

Author

• Pit Rieger, ETH Zurich