Benchmarking de ERM realizado por el Instituto de Auditores Internos

After identifying the European electoral goals of parties and measuring the empirical reality of party organization in Europe at the beginning of the dissertation, I conclude that electoral goals are linked to party organization to the extant that parties with a higher stake in European elections are more likely to centralize their selection and supervision procedures.

I then link goals to candidate type and show that national politicians are likely to enter the EP only with vote seeking parties. Policy seeking parties tend to select politicians with previous EP experience and office seeking parties use the EP as a training ground for new politicians. In the final chapter I combine goals, organization, and candidate type to offer a theory of when MEPs are most likely to provide congruent behavior for their parties. The chapter concludes that organization is a more important indicator of congruence than MEP type and that the most loyal MEPs are those that are centrally selected and included in

13These scholars argue that lack of power of the EP in decision making compared to the other, non-elected institutions increases the democratic deficit.

leadership. In order to reach these conclusion, I examine MEPs from parties with five or more members from across 17 member states.

To reach conclusions outlined above, I use data from a sample of parties in the European parliament across most member states, supplemented by extensive fieldwork at the European Parliament and in selected member states. This project empirically tests the implications of internal, national party controls dictated through formal party rules on candidate selection and legislator behavior. By focusing on the link between national parties and the EP, this project produces innovative results that speak to the nature of multi-level politics in Europe.

Specifically, I directly compare individual MEP behavior to that which would be expected given the preferences of their national parties. The main analysis of the dissertation uses the population of parties that have five or more members in the European Parliament.

Restricting the analysis to parties with multiple members in the EP ensures there can be comparison on both the party and the individual level. Attempting to isolate the effects of individual goals or experience on party and legislator choices become increasing difficult as the number of MEPs per party drops to only a few. The parties included in the analysis are chosen from those serving in the EP in the seventh session (2009-2014) and thus all references to the European Election are in reference to the 2009 European election unless otherwise noted. Complete descriptions of the data can be found in each individual chapter and their appendices.

All of the chapters also incorporate qualitative research from extensive fieldwork. The purpose of this work is to both corroborate the large N findings and add validity to the theoretical foundations used to derive hypotheses about the national party MEP relation-ship. This fieldwork includes interviews with party officials and MEPs mostly from, but not restricted to, Germany, the UK, and Croatia and who are members of the major par-ties belonging to the following EPGs: the Party of the European Socialists (PES), the European People’s Party (EPP), the Alliance of Liberal sand Democrats (ALDE), and the Greens. These data were collected over several months of fieldwork that included interviews of MEPs, their staff, party leaders and other political elites between January 2013 and June 2014. These countries represent party systems that maximize variation in levels of experience with the EU in terms of years of membership (with one accession country/new member),

variance in federal/unitary structures, interest representation, and size (number of members in the EP). This helps ensure that patterns presented and analyzed are the result of the organizational structures of parties instead of specific or unique features of each case. While conducting the fieldwork, I investigated the way MEPs were selected to run for the office and their motivations, as well as the level of discretion given to individual party members that work in the EU and their level of communication with domestic parties.

1.3.1 Chapter 2: A Theory of Political Parties and European Politicians

The next chapter explicates a theory of political party organization and individual behavior centered around the selection and supervision of politicians for elected office. First adapting Strom (1990)’s conceptualization of office, vote, and policy seeking electoral goals to Euro-pean elections, I provide a foundation for understanding what parties can gain in a Europe election. I argue these goals dictate the choices they make for the type of politician they wish to serve them in the EP. Party organization plays an important role in determining how likely it is a party is able to choose their preferred type of politicians and how well they can maintain accountability once a candidate is in office. Subsequently, the individual ambition of each politician and national party organization work together to encourage or discourage cohesion in representation. The theory develops the expectation that nationally ambitious politicians from parties with centralized selection methods and policy and vote seeking goals will provide their parties with the highest level of policy congruence.

1.3.2 Chapter 3: Party Organization

Chapter three investigates patterns in party organization across member states. I examine the centralization of political parties through candidate selection mechanisms for national and European office and the construction of executive party leadership. I argue that the centralization of these two choices have important implications for legislator behavior be-cause they allow the party to control politician’s careers and the power base within the party. Using classic theories of party development and organization, I argue that organi-zation at the European level is the result of national institutional traditions and national

electoral experience. The chapter uses party statutes to compare the selection and supervi-sion procedures across parties and compares European organization to that of the national level. Incorporating data on national level institutions, and unique party characteristics, I use logistic regression to test for the determinants of centralized selection for the EP and the inclusion of MEPs in their party’s leadership. I find that parties are more likely to central-ize than decentralcentral-ize the management of their MEPs under a variety of national institution conditions, which highlights the strong role national politics and party experience play in determining their treatment of MEPs.

1.3.3 Chapter 4: Electoral Goals and Candidate Selection

Chapter4investigates the relationship between European electoral goals and the composition of the EP with respect to personnel. It argues these goals dictate the choice made for candidate selection for the EP and are able to explain why variation exists among MEPs with respect to their past political experience, party service, and European institutional and party group leadership experience. The chapter highlights existing variation in politician type among member states and raises questions about the quality of representative democracy in the EU. A series of logistic regression models test under what conditions certain types of politicians are likely to serve their parties in the EP. The data originates from MEP curriculum vitae, parliamentary service records, and personal websites that are publicly available. I constructed a single comprehensive database recording the experience of MEPs with respect to local, regional, national, ministerial, and prime ministerial service at the national level. It also includes executive party service at the regional and national level as well as experience in the EP (years of service), EP leadership, and EPG leadership. In addition to this political service, the database also features educational achievement, area of educational and professional expertise, and the original data source. The results of the analysis reinforce the second order elections model of European elections. The conditions under which experienced national politicians and party leaders enter the parliament are rare and most likely to occur in vote seeking parties. The EP is found to be an institution for new and upcoming politicians and policy experts from office and policy seeking parties,

illustrating an evolutionary change in the role of the EP in a party’s hierarchy from a retirement home to a training ground.

1.3.4 Chapter 5: Electoral Goals, Organization, and Legislator Behavior

Chapter 5explores the relationship between domestic parties and their MEPS by investigat-ing how party leadership can influence their members outside of the legislative process. This chapter explores the link between party organization and personal ambition in strengthen-ing programmatic representation in the EP. It adds to the current literature on MEP-party relations by offering insight into individual and party goals and how these interact within the structure of European elections and policy making. The effects of variation in party structures, individual political goals, and electoral systems on legislative behavior are tested utilizing an exogenous measure of national party congruence that allows for a comparison across parties and members states. This measure is constructed using data from voting records for MEPs in the seventh session and party ideology from the Comparative Man-ifestos project (Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al. 2006; Volkens et al. 2014). I focus specifically on differences in electoral goals, candidate selection, formal MEP supervision, and individual career experience as the main determinants of policy congruence. The data on party organization introduced in Chapter3 and electoral goals and individual experience of Chapter 4 are combined with qualitative research in the European parliament to test the hypotheses of the chapter. I conclude that centralized candidate selection procedures in-creases an MEPs congruence with their party’s preferences in parties that hold policy seeking or vote seeking electoral goals.

2.0 A THEORY OF POLITICAL PARTIES AND EUROPEAN POLITICIANS

In early 2013, Ingrid Antičević Marinović gave a speech at the European Parliament plenary.

At the time, she was one of 12 observers in the Parliament representing Croatia.¹ The speech quickly made waves across social media and the Croatian press for the alleged poor quality of her English. The Croatian media criticized the speech for its scripted nature and questioned her competence as a European politician. The speech was viewed as embarrassing Croatia in the EP and Ms. Antičević Marinović’s decision to speak English instead of Croatian was perceived as arrogance (Ciglar 2013).² The media also broadened its criticism to her party, the ruling party, and questioned the pary’s decision to send her to the EP. As a member of the SDP, Ms. Antičević Marinović had been chosen by the party leader and then prime minster, Zoran Milanović, to join 4 others as observers in the EP.³ After the speech, Prime Minister Milanović publicly addressed the criticism, defending his choice of Ms. Antičević Marinović and his perceived understanding of her ability to speak English. This happened nearly simultaneously with the preparations for Croatia’s first European election and when it was time for Milanović to select new candidates for EP office, Ms. Antičević Marinović was conspicuously absent from the new electoral list (Dnevnik.hr 2013a).

The example above illustrates three challenges parties face in European elections: who do we choose for Europe? How do we choose them? How do we treat them? First, the backlash of the media and the public against Antičević Marinović’s English underscores a requirement that parties choose candidates for the EP that are perceived to be qualified. Second, the

1Prior to their entry as a full member in June 2013, Croatia only had observer status in the EP.

2Each member state’s native language is an official language of the EU and simultaneous translation is available in the plenary sessions. It is most common for MEPs to speak their native language.

3SDP-Socijaldemokratska Partija Hrvatske.

relative power of this party president in choosing the observers and subsequent candidates is reflected in the personal appeals to him to justify his decision. Finally, the absence of this observer from the following electoral list is an example of one tool parties have to manage the behavior of its MEPs. In this case the tool was the removal of an incumbent, but not all parties have the same tools or even the same goals in these elections. Some parties may be much better at avoiding situations like the one described above because they are organized differently, but all parties must be able to select good agents and manage them effectively.

Some do not succeed. Political parties have many different tools available to them to manage European elections so what explains the variation in the organizational choices they make?

What are the consequences of these choices for policy making and representation?