The European Parliament in the EU Budget Process

• In Event: New Research on EU (Legislative) Politics

Abstract

‘Who gets what, when and how?’ (Harold Lasswell) has always been a key question of policy making, and European Union (EU) politics is certainly not (and has never been) an exemption. Budgetary negotiations have pitted member states against each other and facilitated coalitions of rich vs poor, Northern vs Southern, Eastern vs Western countries. The making of European budgets is also close-ly linked to the political programmes of the EU; it therefore sets supporters of leaner and larger budgets against each other and also affects the allocation of scarce budget means to policy fields favoured by the ‘left’ or by the ‘right’. In short, budgets may act as a proxy and even define what the EU is, what European Union politics can do, and what European integration is all about.

So far, our understanding of voting patterns within and resulting positions of the main institutions with regard to budgetary matters remains overall limited, especially with regard to the EP. In turn, the impact of partisan factors remains somewhat inconclusive. Earlier studies have found some evi-dence for a left-right positioning of member states’ governments in Council negotiations generally, while other studies highlight that the impact of ideological dimensions remains inconsistent and marginal. Regarding budgetary issues, the impact of partisan factors has been investigated by a handful of studies that find that the aggregated ideological composition of the EP in terms of the left-right cleavage does have an impact on budget change.

The proposed paper draws upon a range of datasets which are, mostly, publicly available. A key requirement for the application of sophisticated scaling techniques is the provision of high-quality data on votes in the Council and in the EP. While both are, at least in somewhat raw formats, freely available from the websites of these institutions, we have opted for obtaining high-quality, cleaned and cross-checked data from ‘VoteWatch Europe’ (http://www.votewatch.eu). Apart from the contribution of independent analyses and recommendations, this organisation has specialised on the scraping, checking, and provision of formatted, high-quality data on voting behaviour in the Council and in the EP for secondary analyses. In addition to the publication of machine-readable datasets, VoteWatch has also linked and categorised individual votes and provides tools for easy descriptive analyses.

Our results reveal the significant impact of (scaled) spatial policy positions on budgetary voting both concerning the size and the distribution of the EU budget.

Author

• Guido Tiemann, Institute for Advanced Studies