I DENTIFICACIÓN Y CLASIFICACIÓN DE LAS EMERGENCIAS

The role of EP office has often been conceptualized as possessing two different functions.

On one hand, exemplified by the electoral experience of MEPs in the UK discussed in the introduction, the EP can be a breeding ground for national politicians, or a “primary school of politics." It is a place for newcomers to get their feet wet, prove they can win elections,

and/or prove they can sustain office. On the other hand, it has also been characterized as a retirement home for aging politicians that parties no longer want to hold domestic office positions, but are unwilling to remove from politics all together. The research reported here shows that this second idea, that of the EP as a retirement home, is no longer an accurate description of the EP. It is much more likely that the EP is either a training ground for new or young politicians or an institution with its own class of politicians. Parties may use the office as a reward to their newest, most loyal, and most active young members or they may have an entirely separate faction of party politicians dedicated to EP service. Especially after examining the policy seeking results of the models, the results of the electoral goals might represent growing tendencies to separate European from national politics within a party’s electoral strategy.

Ultimately, this research contributes to the growing literature on the EP and the role of national parties in the politics of this increasingly important institution. The results support existing research claiming that European elections are second order national elections, where parties and voters use national issues to decide the election (Reif and Schmitt 1980). How-ever, I show that parties are acting strategically given their second order electoral goals while simultaneously using them as opportunities to train new politicians. Which strategy per-vades is dependent on the national electoral experience of each individual party. I also show that the effect of second order elections on the composition of the EP is conditional. Some parties opt to use the election purely for political gains in the national arena–office seeking and vote seeking–while others are seeking to strategically place well qualified politicians in office–policy seeking.

The analysis of this chapter highlights the conditions under which national parties will select different types of candidates and concludes that newcomers are far more likely to be chosen over experienced members of parties under a variety of conditions. This may be the result of the growing tendencies for the EP to be a learning ground for national politics or a separate political arena all together, with little switching between political levels. National politicians are likely to join the EP only when parties are seeking to maximize their votes in European elections. These are well known politicians with years of experience that are likely to attract votes to their party’s list. The results also report that policy goals are

weak predictors of candidate type. This suggests that preferences over European integration and/or the salience of European elections within a party’s membership do not play a strong role in developing the electoral strategy of a party for European elections. Since office seeking and vote seeking goals are the result of purely national electoral experiences and motivations, these findings support the persistence of second order elections when Europe’s parliament is being elected. The implications of this are sure to be the subject of further study. If parties are choosing to nominate and subsequently provide different types of politicians to the EP, there is sure to be interesting variation in MEP behavior with respect to their member states’, parties’, and constituents’ interests.

The results of this chapter have many implications for representation in the EP. This analysis shows that the type of politician a party chooses to send the to the EP is usually a direct result of national electoral politics and not strong policy concerns. This extends the effect of the second order nature of European elections beyond just accountability and legitimacy. Parties will choose their politicians for the EP to make strategic gains at the national level, instead of considering the best way to represent any relevant policy interest they may have. An institution composed of partly inexperienced legislators, nationally ambi-tious legislators, and those seeking to hold European careers will naturally be unbalanced in the quality of representation each individual constituency receives. In order to understand this relationship more thoroughly, the next chapter will examine how the combination of ambition and party organization influence legislative behavior directly.

5.0 ELECTORAL GOALS, ORGANIZATION, AND LEGISLATIVE BEHAVIOR

This final empirical chapter of the dissertation builds on the analysis of the previous two, combining the data on party organization, electoral goals, and politician type to examine how party and individual attributes work together to influence legislative outcomes. The analysis investigates national party-MEP congruence, defined as the compatibility of MEP voting behavior with their party’s ideological preferences, to determine under what condi-tions parties encourage or discourage their most preferred accondi-tions. I examine the effects of party centralization because parties are constrained in reaching their goals by three major attributes of party organization: the centralization of decision making, the quality of re-cruitment structures, and personnel accountability (Norris 1997a; Tavits 2013). As such, a theory on party control and the relationship between national parties and MEPs requires analysis of the centralization of candidate selection and supervision. All of these processes play a role in determining the loyalty of a representative to their national party and the level of policy congruence between domestic political parties and European legislative outcomes.

I argue that centralized parties with nationally ambitious MEPs and office or vote seeking goals are more likely to experience compatible behavior from their MEPs. The careers of these MEPs are not only controlled by the centralization of the party, these MEPs also often wish to return to national politics and will cater to the national party in order to do so.

In addition to simultaneously testing all the theoretical components of the dissertation, the analysis makes both a methodological and a substantive contribution to the EP liter-ature on party politics. First, I introduce a new way of examining cohesion by comparing the legislative activity of MEPs to their national parties’ policy preferences using a party measure that is exogenous to the EP. I also examine behavior across both consequential and

inconsequential legislation and across economic policy, foreign policy, and employment pol-icy which allows for an in depth assessment of the impact of parties and individuals across many different types of EP legislation. Second, I introduce the role of party organization for cohesion in a novel way using the unique data I have collected on the treatment of MEPs within their national parties. I find the level of congruence parties experience varies across legislative procedures, policy areas, and parties and incumbent MEPs that are centrally se-lected enjoy the highest level of congruence on consequential legislation and policy areas where the EP has substantial power.