Competing Logics of Roll Call Request in the European Parliament

• In Event: European Parliament

Abstract

Roll call votes are widely used to measure legislators’ ideology and to test theories of legislative politics. For example, there is a large literature that rely on roll call votes in the European Parliament to describe politics in the EP and to test theories of legislative politics more generally. However, in many parliaments, the EP included, roll call voting is not the default voting mode. It must be requested by an interested actor in order for the vote to be recording. Recently, the potential selection effects of roll call request have received scholarly attention. Two alternative theoretical logics are proposed; disciplining and signalling. We spell out the common and competing predictions that follow from these theories and test them empirically. A distinguishing feature of our empirical investigation is that we have, in addition to high quality data from the EP plenary, also have detailed data on voting in EP committees, and is hence able to establish the level of party unity and between party competition prior to the plenary stage.

Authors

• Bjørn Høyland, University of Oslo

• Simon Hug, University of Geneva