Voting at the surface
Roll call votes in the European
Parliament1
Clifford Carrubba (Emory University)
Matthew Gabel
(Washington University-St. Louis)
Simon
Hug2(Université de Genève)
Paper prepared for presentation
at the
2nd Conference on the Political Economy of International Organizations
January 29-31, 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland
This version Jul 12, 2009
Abstract
Theoretical models suggest that the
cohesion of parties in parliaments is affected by roll call requests.
Similarly, these models suggest that the decision to request a roll call
vote depends, among others, on the heterogeneity of preferences in
parties, as well as the relative position of the status quo compared to
the parties' preferred policy. Drawing on data assembled by
and combining information from the dataset
stemming from the project ``Decision-making in the European Union''
(DEU) [] with roll call data from the European
parliament [] we find suggestive empirical evidence in
support of the implications from the theoretical models. This suggests
that inferences based on roll call votes in parliaments that only partly
make available information on the MPs' voting decision, are fraught with
considerable inferential problems.
Footnotes:
1Simon acknowledges the financial support of the Swiss
National Science Foundation (Grant No 100012-111909) and Fabian Wagner.
Data and information on how to use it were made available by the
European Parliament, Stefanie Bailer and Simon Hix, to whom we are very
grateful.
2 Département de science politique, Faculté des sciences
économiques et sociales; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont
d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 83 78; email:
simon.hug@politic.unige.ch
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