5. Resultados obtenidos
5.1 Resultados para la banda de 94 GHz
useful to compare these cases of nationality prevailing over EPG line after having disaggregated them by party group, nationality and finally by committee. Table 10 and Figure 5 show how many times in each EPG a member has voted against its line to join the majority of his/her fellow countrymen.
45 This, of course, depends also on the fact that sometimes, especially for the smaller countries, the national line is actually defined by the two bigger EPGs (and still many vote, notwithstanding in a decreasing fashion, are based on a “grand coalition” between People’s party and Socialists).
46 Also Hix et al. (2007) find similar disproportional results. Their original table showing loyalty and rebelliousness by EPG and national party can be found in the appendix, in table a5.
Figure 7. Number and percentage of national prevailing by EPG, EP6 (2004-2009)
Table 11. Number and percentage of national prevailing by EPG, EP6 (2004-2009)
Source: author’s own compilation (both).
The “relative” data refers to the percentage of times a certain EPG witnesses one of his members voting in such rebellious way. Not surprisingly, the three groups where this happens most often are the two euro-sceptic groups and the non-attached members; however, the true interruption is, similarly to what happened when looking at AI outliers (see chapter 3), between the first two groups (IND/DEM and non attached) and the other groups47. It is worth noting that the two main groups are quite distant from each other. EPP-ED is the first of the big groups (2.89%), while the Socialists are on the opposite situation (1.94%). Socialists are second only to the Greens, the group that shows
47 From almost 8% of non-attached members to 3.8% of UEN.
EPP-ED 60357 IND/DEM 8.40%
the lowest percentage of national alignments (only 1.22%). Liberals and radical left show very similar percentages (2.1% and 2.04%),
What is also interesting, though, is to look at the absolute numbers of this phenomenon: when it comes to voting it is the actual numbers that count. Clearly, bigger groups have more chances to influence (in this case, with their national-oriented votes) the result, changing the outcome of the vote from “approve” to “reject” (or vice-versa). The percentages shown before “weight” differently each group according to its size: in other words, they show how often, in relation to the number of votes cast within the group, such national alignment emerges. On the other hand, in terms of sheer numbers it is the two biggest groups (EPP-ED, SOC) that, not surprisingly, cast the highest number of these rebellious votes. In particular, EPP/ED has almost the double of national-prevailing votes than the Socialists, despite having only 68 MEPs more than the Socialist group48. This is certainly a consequence of the co-existence of the two different souls, People’s Party and European Democrats, and in particular of the behaviour of the “usual suspect” UK delegation (Faas 2003: 850). G/EFA group remains in the last place, confirming that it happens rarely that its members vote against the party line.
Interesting insights can be elicited also from the distribution of national alignments according to MEPs’ country of origin, of course. First this is shown in absolute values, also differentiating by EPG (table 11, figure 6) and then in relative values (percentages, table 12 and figure 7).
48 Precisely 268 EPP-ED members, in comparison to 200 Socialists.
Table 12. Number of national prevailing by EPG and country, EP6 (2004-2009)
Source: author’s own compilation.
Clearly, also here the countries that show the highest number of national alignments are the bigger countries that elect more MEPs. UK are, again, the champion of nationality prevailing over EPG: more than 31,000 times in the five years of the 6th EP a British MEP has voted in such way. UK’s overall number is almost two times the second country, France (roughly 16,000). Then we find Poland, again a quite big member state in terms of EP representation (50 MEPs in the sixth legislature). A striking exception seems to be Czech Republic, a historically euro-sceptic country: despite having only 24 MEPs in the considered time span, the phenomenon of national alignment has happened more than 10,000 times: a value close to – for instance – that of Italy (roughly 13,000), a country that has more than three times the number of MEPs (precisely 78). As for UK, these alignments come from members of the Czech Civic Democratic Party, forming together with the British conservatives the sub-group ED. Germany, on the other hand, despite its large delegation is way beyond these five countries:
“only” roughly 8,000 alignments of such.
To see how these trends change by country and by EPG, figure 8 shows graphically, in each country, how many MEPs for each groups form a
ALDE EPP-ED EUL/NGL G/EFA IND/DEM SOC UEN na Total
Austria 389 1068 0 140 0 959 0 1781 4337
Belgium 819 1517 0 172 0 603 0 1033 4144
Bulgaria 174 107 0 0 0 222 0 719 1222
Cyprus 173 389 211 0 0 0 0 0 773
Czech Republic 0 7312 1131 0 726 139 0 1554 10862
Denmark 475 432 201 93 1286 1616 691 0 4794
Estonia 84 45 0 0 0 419 0 0 548
Finland 574 807 207 55 0 243 0 0 1886
France 3566 3505 231 268 862 7901 0 622 16955
Germany 1426 3130 995 612 0 2368 0 0 8531
Greece 0 4426 603 0 854 1328 0 0 7211
Hungary 101 2584 0 0 0 886 0 0 3571
Ireland 262 849 91 0 1116 25 2225 0 4568
Italy 2776 2272 652 130 0 1680 3736 2200 13446
Latvia 139 304 0 154 0 0 1572 0 2169
Lithuania 834 149 0 0 0 122 563 0 1668
Luxembourg 113 310 0 60 0 247 0 0 730
Malta 0 325 0 0 0 687 0 0 1012
Netherlands 669 1063 413 190 2929 1075 0 0 6339
Poland 1804 2336 0 0 3342 1684 3500 1266 13932
Portugal 0 1130 263 0 0 577 0 0 1970
Romania 135 415 0 240 0 241 0 670 1701
Slovakia 0 492 0 0 0 202 0 3126 3820
Slovenia 95 175 0 0 0 47 0 0 317
Spain 279 2870 31 161 0 2206 0 0 5547
Sweden 576 3629 759 308 1735 2005 0 0 9012
UK 910 18716 167 753 1204 4193 0 5840 31783
Total 16373 60357 5955 3336 14054 31675 12287 18811 162848
national alignment. For simplicity only the first 16 countries are presented49.
Figure 8. Number of national prevailing by EPG, EP6 (2004-2009)
Source: author’s own compilation.
This information is not insightful only for the mere point of view of which country has more national-oriented votes, since as noted before this it is dependent o the country delegation size. What can be telling is
49 Latvia, Portugal, Finland, Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Malta, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovenia were thus excluded.
to see, within a country, which EPGs are more touched by this phenomenon.
As already shown in the previous table, UK is the champion of nationality prevailing over EPG, as partially recognized by the literature (Hix et al. 2007; Faas 2003); what strikes is that the sole votes cast by EPP-ED members are enough to outnumber the second country, France. This confirms the heterogeneity of UK national delegation in this group: no surprise, for the subsequent legislature (7th EP) the EP has reverted to a “pure” People’s Party group, the British MEPs merging with other conservatives in the ECR group, born in 2009. Also many British non-attached members voted in a national prevailing fashion, while the remaining groups (IND/DEM, ALDE, F/EFA) less.
Also the British Socialists show a pretty disciplined voting behaviour, considering the size of the delegation. France, on the other hand, has many national prevailing votes primarily due to its Socialist delegation.
This is a unique phenomenon in the 6th Parliament: in no other country so many Socialist MEPs form national alignments. Poland and Italy show a similar picture: national alignments are almost homogeneously distributed amongst all groups50, but the most consistent are he euro-sceptic groups (UEN for Poland, UEN and IND/DEM for Italy). France and Italy, actually, have also a substantial number of ALDE members voting in such way, a characteristic that they share only with another country, Germany. As already discussed before, the Czech EPP-ED delegation that is responsible for most of the national alignments in that country. No surprise, most of MEPs from the Civic Democratic Party later left the People’s Party to join the ECR group in the following European legislature. Greece shows a similar trend, though its EPP-ED members remained in the group after 2009. Spain has these alignments split almost equally between the two main groups. Netherlands and Ireland’s alignment depend mostly on UEN for the former, IND/DEM for the latter. Slovakia, finally, shows a curious pattern: almost all these votes are due to the non-attached members51. All the other countries show no peculiar trends.
Figure 9, as opposed to the data presented before, shows the percentage of nationality prevailing for each country, calculated over the number
50 Except IND/DEM (Italy) and EUL/NGL and G/EFA (Poland), groups for which they elect do not elect any MEP, as shown in table 6.
51 Considering that Slovakia in 2004 elected only three n/a MEPs and in five years (6,200 roll-call votes) this alignment emerged roughly 3,000 times, these three MEPs voted half of the time in this way. But, as noted extensively, the voting pattern of non-attached members is not particularly significant.
of votes cast (thus controlling for the size), thus representing a sort of map of Europe’s national alignments.
Figure 9. Map of national prevailing (percentage) by country, EP6 (2004-2009)
Source: author’s own compilation.
Most of the big states that in absolute terms showed a high number of national alignments score actually quite low in percentage terms (Italy, France, especially Germany). Poland, on the contrary, remains in the higher part of this list (3.7%). UK is not the country with the highest score anymore: Czech Republic and Sweden, two traditionally euro-sceptic countries, have the highest percentages (7.3% and 6.6%
respectively). Then, after the UK, Slovakia and Denmark can be found.
In general, except for the exploratory meaning of this map, the inference than can be drawn from this list and the previous data is the following: euro-sceptic countries tend to be a higher number of votes
where nationality prevails over EPG group52. This is further reinforced by the results of next paragraph’s statistic analysis.
Finally, these results are disaggregated according to the committee.
Figure 8 shows how many national alignments actually occurred in each of EP6’s 25 committees.
Figure 8. Number of national prevailing by committee, EP6 (2004-2009)
Source: author’s own compilation.
As it can be easily seen, the committees where the phenomenon under scrutiny emerges the most are consistent with what has been proved in chapter 4 using MEPs’ assistant survey data: nationality-oriented votes correlate with crucial, legislative committees. The five most important committees can be all found in the first nine committees where nationality prevails the most: ENVI, AGRI, AFET, TRAN, LIBE, ECON, AFCO, IMCO, ITRE. The only (relatively) surprising result is the presence of the Foreign Affairs committee in such a high position (third). In fact, other scholars have found interestingly counter-intuitive findings about this committee. For instance, Whitaker (2011) has found
52 Here, of course, no argument can be made about the question of national interests at stake in the votes, since no information on this issue can be derived from the dataset.
0!
an intuitive correlation between the legislative power of a committee and the probability of MEPs not changing committee: clearly, MEPs seek to work in a committee that counts. However, AFET committee,
“despite its legislative weakness, was also associated with comparatively high probability of MEPs remaining on it across half-term” (Whitaker 2011: 49).
In my analysis, the presence on national alignments in AFET can be due to the fact that this committee, despite having almost no real power, is nonetheless perceived as crucial because of the symbolic value of its resolutions. Thus its members often vote in open contrast to the EPG line and forming a national alignment, even though no actual legislative and binding decision is at stake. An example of this possibility is proposed in chapter 7.