Transnational Party Competition? Transnational Political Groups Positions and Ideological Coherence

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1 Transnational Party Competition? Transnational Political Groups Positions and Ideological Coherence Zoe Lefkofridi University of Salzburg and Alexia Katsanidou GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences Alexia.Katsanidou@gesis.org Paper prepared for Workshop Rejected Europe. Beloved Europe. Cleavage Europe? Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, May 18-19, Abstract To what extent are the conditions for the emergence of a transnational party system fertile? We examine the positions and ideological coherence of transnational political groups in the European Parliament (EP) across issue dimensions. We use data collected by two Voting Advice Applications designed for the 2009 and 2014 EP Elections respectively (EU Profiler and Euandi). Our empirical inquiry generates some hope for those advocating in favor of a European- level party system, because transnational groups occupy both sides of the issue dimensions under study. Ideological coherence varies across transnational groups and across issues; importantly, we observe improvements between 2009 and

2 Party Democracy in Crisis? The project of cooperation and integration devised to cure the continent from nationalism, racism and antagonism between European states is going through tough times. The European Union (EU) shows signs of disintegration and its future looks gloomy. The economic crisis in the Eurozone was triggered by the outbreak of the global financial crisis (2008) when not only European unity and solidarity, but also representative democracy, came under strain. Beyond eliciting soul- searching within the EU, the nature and duration of this crisis exposed the Union s democratic deficits: during crisis management, the executive power and non- majoritarian, technocratic institutions often sidelined European citizens and democracy more broadly 1. Even worse, the economic crisis management gave European citizens the impression that politics is irrelevant, and that political parties offer them no alternative policy routes (see Alonso, 2014). This, however, implies the death of representative democracy understood as a competitive political system in which competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision- making process (Schattschneider, 1960, p. 14). This is especially damaging for the reputation of political parties who are the key actors in representative democracies. Parties are expected to voice citizens policy preferences and to translate these into public policies. Given their centrality in representative democracies, if political parties fail to articulate clear alternatives and to give citizens real choices, party democracy in Europe and representation via parties will eventually also fail. 1 The way the crisis has been managed is in sharp contrast with the spirit of the latest treaty reforms and deliberations that date back to the Convention on the future of Europe (2001-3). Both the rejected draft Constitutional Treaty, and its subsequent, modified version what came to be known as the Lisbon Treaty (2009) sought to strengthen citizen participation in EU policymaking - inter alia by strengthening the EP. Democrats all over Europe welcomed the Lisbon Treaty as an unsatisfactory yet important first step towards addressing the Union s deep democratic deficit, e.g. by making the EP an equal partner to the EU Council in most policy areas. Its empowerment has thus been conceived as a healthy counter- weight to and a democratic control of executive power at the EU level, which remains largely beyond the control of European citizens. 2

3 Whether and to what extent existing political parties are capable of expressing citizens diverse opinions (Sartori, 1976) so that these get represented in EU policy- making matters for representative democracy, but also for citizens support of the European project: citizens who feel their voice is represented in the EU are more likely to uphold support for the EU even when their perceptions of the state of economy are poor (McEvoy, 2016). Crucially, when the economic dimension of the EU community is increasingly transnational, the political dimension cannot remain confined within territorial borders because in this scenario, citizens (who are also consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, etc.) will be unable to feed their concerns, needs and views into the EU policy- making process adequately. Citizens should be able to choose from distinguishable policy alternatives that influence the political dimension of the EU. For some observers, therefore, policy alternatives can only be formulated by EU- level parties, which must become the integrating force in the EU because they share similar values and objectives (Collignon, 2011). Yet, can EU- level party formations take up this task? The question is imminent because the crisis has led to an unprecedented degree of Europe s politicization. One of the most important consequences of the ongoing crisis is that it forced debates on thorny issues of European integration into the open : EU jargon like Brexit, no- bailout clause, Transfer Union and questions about European values moved beyond university lecture halls and parliaments and penetrated the national media and personal discussions around the continent. For the first time in the history of European integration Europeans got thirsty for European news, about what EU officials and political leaders say or do (Poschardt, 2015). This is very important because despite increasing policy transfers to the EU level and the empowering of EU- level institutions EU policy and polity issues had, up until the crisis, been largely absent from national and European Parliament (EP) election campaigns (e.g. Pennings, 2006). In the literature, the politicization of Europe had thus been portrayed as a sleeping giant (Van der Eijk and Franklin, 2004), or perhaps a giant that had been sedated by (mainstream) national parties (Mair, 2007). As debates about the policies citizens would like to see at the EU level were lacking, policy conflicts were often (mistakenly) articulated as national conflicts (Collignon, 2011). The only parties that sought to mobilize voters on issues of European integration have been the 3

4 parties on the extreme poles (de Vries, 2007), albeit for very different reasons (Hooghe et al, 2002). In spite of such critical voices, mainstream national parties had avoided engaging wholeheartedly with European integration based on the assumption that their national constituents were indifferent or ignorant about EU issues. Through the crisis, however, a majority of European citizens realized that they are interdependent not just economically but also politically; it became evident that cooperation at the EU level is often indispensable but also that EU membership posed significant policy constraints to national governments. However, the behavior of many political parties during the economic and financial crisis seemed to be falling behind the curve: instead of focusing on policy solutions that would benefit the EU as a whole, they engaged in blame- games and endorsed nationalistic rhetoric (mainly out of fear of losing votes to the populist radical right). This, however, created more problems than it solved because it cultivated a climate of distrust, and undermined solidarity, which further worsened party governments capacity to solve the crisis. Going it alone makes each individual party less powerful within the EU system - especially vis- à- vis non- majoritarian institutions (which are completely insulated from citizen control). Given the central role of parties in representative democracy, their weakening equates the fading capacity of citizens to have a say over policy outcomes that concern them. The waning of citizens voices, in turn, signifies the enfeeblement of democracy. Hence national political parties are now faced with a critical juncture: for representative democracy to function at this stage of European integration, they should be able to mobilize across borders. For a transnational party system to emerge, however, we should witness both variation between transnational parties, and coherence within them (Bardi et al., 2010). To be able to successfully pursue an EU- level policy agenda that competes against alternatives, transnational groups must be ideologically coherent. Ideological coherence is thus a prerequisite for parties capacity to operate beyond territorial borders and to pursue common, supranational policy goals that is, common European policies that aim at serving European citizens as a collective. In this study, we empirically assess transnational parties related potential through a thorough examination of their positions that pays attention to: whether they are able to present alternatives so that we can speak of EU- level competition and a 4

5 European party system; and the extent to which policy congruence matters for joining a transnational group, as well as the degree of coherence within transnational groups across issues. In detail, we ask: to what extent do transnational political groups in the EP present different positions on policy issues? To what extent are they internally coherent across policy issues, i.e. to what extent do their member parties join these groups based on congruent positions in different issue areas? Which issues are more/less problematic for transnational cooperation between members of the same transnational group, and which issues are more/less problematic when it comes to inter- transnational group competition? (How) did the crisis impact transnational groups ideological coherence and potential for competition? Our answers to these questions are based on data on party positions collected by two Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) designed for the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament Elections respectively (EU Profiler and Euandi): we find traces of a supranational party system with transnational groups occupying both sides of the issues under study; but we also identify differences in the levels of ideological coherence within transnational parties. The crisis and the steps towards more European integration that occurred between 2009 and 2014 have clearly left their mark as some of the transnational groups have improved their coherence. We also find clear differences across issues. Our study contributes to several important scholarly and political debates: to begin with, we enrich the debate on transnational party groups ideological coherence inter alia by empirically examining the effect of the economic and financial crisis. Coherence constitutes a useful indicator of the development of European- level democracy and transnational partisanship (White, 2014) 2 in particular. Our study extends previous works on ideological coherence and the role of policy congruence on national parties choices of transnational groups (Bardi et al., 2010; McElroy and Benoit, 2010; 2012). In addition, our study contributes to knowledge of how parties adapt to processes of European integration as well as adds to the broader debate regarding 2 If partisanship refers to one s attachment to a community of shared commitments and the activity in pursuit of these commitments in coordination with others, it is transnational when these attachments overstep the boundaries of a nation- state (White, 2014p. 395). 5

6 party response to changes in their institutional and policy environment (e.g. Poguntke et al., 2007). Last but not least, this research additionally complements the picture painted by studies of legislative behavior and alliance formation in the EP (e.g. Hix et al., 2009; 2006). Policy- seeking in a Multilevel Polity Assuming that political parties are purposeful organizations that pursue multiple goals simultaneously (votes, office, policy, see Müller and Strøm, 1999), here we focus on parties pursuit of policy goals. The policy- seeking model of party behavior emerged as a response to policy- blind assumptions in early game- theoretical studies of government formation (e.g. de Swaan, 1973). In particular, this model challenged the assumption that all parties are equally possible coalition partners (Müller and Strøm, 1999,p. 7). Although this model was originally conceived for explaining government participation, we can use it to understand how national parties join transnational party groups. In our view, the formation of transnational party groups is also a type of coalition formation because it requires policy compromises and an effort to focus on the common rather than conflicting goals (see below). Central to our discussion are the assumptions underlying the policy- seeking model: not all combinations of parties are feasible because loyalty in the party s policy positions matters. In what follows, we discuss how EU membership affects parties policy- seeking and how cooperation can help parties influence policy outcomes in a multilevel polity; in this context, we also address obstacles to policy- seeking cooperation in the EP. How the EU environment impacts policy- seeking EU membership brings national parties in an international, multilevel policy arena with numerous other actors (e.g. EU institutions, interest groups) that pursue their own policy objectives. Hence, the agenda- setting capacity of individual parties is weakened by the EU structure, while uncertainty regarding party ability to shift policy outcomes in the desired direction increases. Thus, individual parties optimization of public policy influence is progressively under pressure. However, when national parties join forces with parties from other member states, their voice in the system grows stronger. This, in turn, is important for the quality of representation: as choosing among national 6

7 political parties is the only way for citizens to be represented in the EU arena, the way parties behave affects whether (and to what extent) citizens voice can be heard. Participation in a transnational group is thus an important prerequisite of effective policy pursuit and, consequently, citizen representation; when a party is non- affiliated it is also much weaker in terms of influencing EP legislation. The weakness of the non- affiliated, independent members is also the reason that even the most Eurosceptic parties in Europe, the radical right nationalist parties, took pains to form an alliance in the EP. Opposing European integration, while sitting under the umbrella of a European party undermines the core of their ideology, and contradicts their nationalist perception of the world. However, these parties eventually realized that their opposition to European integration may benefit from their cooperation. It became clear to them that their policy seeking may become more effective if they speak with one voice. In sum, individual national parties can increase efficacy in policy pursuit at the EU level only via the creation of common fronts, that is cooperation with parties in other member states. Like in processes of classic coalition formation, cooperation within transnational groups requires policy compromises not least because party members originate from different national contexts and their preferences in policy areas x, y, z are not identical; hence, members of transnational groups need to concentrate on what unites them rather than what divides them. Before the launch of the Single Market in the 1990s, policy- seeking parties may have not perceived European integration as impacting their policy goals to the extent that they would today. Since an increasing number of policy areas are transferred to the European level, parties with serious aspirations at specific policy goals have increasing incentives to be active at that level. Besides increasing policy transfers to the EU levels, successive enlargements have increased the number of EU member states from 6 to 28. In the EU- 28 polity, no single party can unilaterally affect any policy outcome, irrespective of the size and power of the member state. In sum, to shift EU policy outcomes in the desired direction, national parties need to coordinate their policy activity with parties that share their values and policy objectives. The EP provides a unique opportunity in this regard; however, the development of transnational parties has been very slow. 7

8 Transnational Groups in the EP and the Role of National Parties The EP is not just the only collective body whose composition can be determined directly by the European people, and the only supranational institution with a clear mandate of citizen representation; it is also the only supranational institution where citizens representatives sit along party- ideological - instead of national/territorial- lines. Yet, the actual architecture of the EP representation channel results in a split- level party system seeking to balance territorial and partisan competition (Lord, 2004p. 116). Elections to the EP are organized at the national level: every five years citizens of national constituencies go to the polls to select among candidates for EP membership that are sorted in national parties. After the election, the MEPs of each national party re- sort themselves into transnational political groups so as to make policy and (co- ) decide on legislation that affects the EU citizenry as a whole. The EP could thus be utilized as an instrument for optimizing influence on public policy, e.g. by vetoing or promoting change (Hix and Goetz, 2000): being the medium towards parliamentary representation at the EU level, the EP opens up unique opportunities to forge transnational cooperation among like- minded parties from different EU member states. However, the development of transnational parties has been hindered by the weight of national political settings on party organization strategy and style of competition style in EP elections (e.g. Europe s de- politicization mentioned above) (Bardi et al., 2010). Moreover, national parties have shown few signs of adaptation to the EU environment in terms of their organizational structures (Poguntke et al., 2007), and their policy positions (e.g. Lefkofridi, 2015). Although EU membership changes dramatically the policy and polity environment of national parties, a large majority has done little to adapt. The exception here are Green parties, which managed to bring about policy change to their national systems via successful coordination at EU level; the Greens managed to shape but were also shaped by the integration process (Bomberg, 2002). Except for the Greens, most national parties made little or no effort to transfer their organizations loyalty to the EU level. Instead, they kept Europe on their organizational and ideological periphery (Poguntke et al., 2007). This is because they even those momentarily involved at the EU level - - have been deeply entrenched and professionalized in terms of career expectations in their respective national regimes. National elites made a similar assumption about publics. 8

9 The assumption that European publics lack a sense of belonging together, of feeling European and of identifying with Europe demotivated party elites and prevented them from investing a lot of energy in pursuing closer cooperation with other political parties in the EP. In the eyes of national party elites, even if their organizations would manage to run common campaigns, they would be unable to mobilize national publics for transnational causes. At the same elites did very little to cultivate a sense of belonging through appropriate EU policies: while national governments were eager to transfer competences in some policy areas (e.g. economy or environment), they were very reluctant in promoting cooperation in others, such as culture and education or the media, which they considered as strictly national policy areas. In other words, the building of a European identity was never actively pursued by elites (at the level of neither masses nor party organizations) as, for instance, the building of the Single Market. While economic actors were allowed to transnationalize, political actors were expected to remain by and large bound to national borders. Surprisingly, however, some Europeans did cultivate a sense of belonging. In spite of parties lack of effort and the lack of related policies, impressive proportions of Europeans in both East and West do identify with Europe (Ceka and Sojka, 2016); moreover, during the crisis, a big part among them proved eager to provide solidarity to fellow Europeans facing difficulties. This suggests a certain sense of belonging, which can be mobilized by transnational parties. This is particularly important now that because of the crisis, and through the crisis, there is ever more politicization of Europe, i.e. the mobilization of more and more EU citizens paying attention to the integration process and expressing a greater range of opinions about it a diversity that seeks expression at the EU level. Dimensions of Political Conflict and Expected Patterns of Variation Maintaining policy coherence from one legislative period to another is a constant challenge for transnational groups; in essence, their degree of coherence depends on the behavior of constituent national parties, which in turn, need to be electorally successful in domestic arenas: how parties re- position themselves in the political space depends upon changes in the domestic party systems, such as the respective moves of their competitors, and/or changes in the degree of issue salience (McElroy and Benoit, 9

10 2012). Hence, a basic expectation is that ideological coherence will vary within transnational groups over time and we expect the crisis to have played a role in this regard. If the level of coherence of transnational party groups is likely to be affected when national parties reposition themselves because of developments in the national arena and leadership changes, then the economic crisis provides us with a situation where many relevant changes occurred: new parties emerged, while traditional parties got weaker and the issue salience of the EU skyrocketed. Second, a related question concerns the issue areas where transnational coherence is most/least likely. Research on EP representation and legislative behavior has mainly focused on the left- right and European integration as the two key dimensions in EP politics. Starting with the left- right, it is a convenient heuristic yet a crude measure of ideology - - and especially so if we understand party systems as dynamic and their poles as interactive (Sartori, 1982). A party can be characterized as left or right according to its positions on either socioeconomic and sociocultural politics (Rydgren, 2007p. 243). The former dimension typically concerns the state s intervention in the economy and crystallizes in the ideological conflict between economic socialism (redistribution, equality, etc.) and economic liberalism (liberalization, privatization, etc.), whereas the latter refers to issues touching upon culture law and order and immigration. Immigration, however, may have related to both advantages and disadvantages of socioeconomic (fear that immigrants will take our jobs) and of sociocultural (e.g. fear that Muslims will threaten our culture and way of life) nature. Hence, in order to get a more concrete picture of transnational parties potential for common policy action, as well as where the problems may lie, we should examine separate issues rather than the general left- right. On the issue of European integration, mainstream parties (Social Democratic, Christian Democratic and Liberal parties) tend to be pro- European, whereas parties on the extremes express opposition to the EU, albeit for very different reasons. On the one hand, radical right parties accuse the EU of being undemocratic and insulated from the preferences of national publics. In their view, domestic policy fails to respond to national publics because of the EU; to solve this problem, the radical right advocates the need to halt European integration, reinstate supremacy of EU law, and push for policy spill backs (e.g. natives priority over immigrants, including fellow EU citizens) 10

11 (Lefkofridi and Michel, 2017). On the other hand, Euroscepticism from the radical left concentrates on the EU s neoliberal direction (Hooghe et al., 2002) that harms especially the poorer strata, who lack the resources (e.g. education) to survive the competition that the Single Market fosters. Economic integration promotes liberalization and privatization in the domestic markets- including the marketization of health and social services; according to radical left Eurosceptics this comes at the expense of the policy preferences the disadvantaged, poorer strata s preferences. The strength of either of these extremes in each member state, and the degree of public Euroscepticism may, in turn, affect the salience of Europe and/or challenge the pro- EU position of mainstream parties as it did in the context of Brexit. Previous research has shown that European integration connects to different issues in the North and South of the EU (Otjes and Katsanidou, 2016). Finally, we should underline that though some ideologies are more coherent than others, no ideology is completely uniform or set in stone. Previous research on party families has found the Greens to be the most ideologically homogenous family, followed by the Social Democrats. The Christian Democrats and Conservatives are less homogeneous, and so are Radical Right parties (Ennser, 2010). The most diverse family is the liberal. Liberal parties have historically been split between conservative liberalism and radicalism, whereas nowadays they oscillate between right, center- right but also center- left (Marks and Wilson, 2000). Although we expect similar patterns in the transnational groups of the EP, we acknowledge that they are not exactly a reproduction of what we call party families. Party family is a more static concept compared to the dynamic transnational group formation in the EP (McElroy and Benoit, 2012); this is yet another reason why we need to carefully examine policy coherence on different issues. Methodology and Data We use data on party positions from the 2009 EU Profiler (Trechsel, 2009) and the euandi 2014 (Garzia et al., 2015). The EU Profiler and the euandi are VAAs designed for the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections respectively. As the design of these VAAs is compatible with both spatial/policy proximity and directional models of party competition and voting behavior, the data is ideal for our investigation of intra- 11

12 European political group policy coherence. Furthermore, these data allow investigating the member parties of eight European political groups that come from all EU member states (EU27 in 2009, EU28 in 2104) based on comparable measurements. Party positions on these issues are based on experts coding of a wide variety of party documents (see Garzia et al., 2015: 3, Table I) and the parties themselves have confirmed these positions. As such, they are slightly superior to expert surveys. We consciously avoid using elite studies such as candidate surveys not only because of their low response rates but also because, to capture party positions, we would have to average positions of individuals that are affiliated with both national and EU- level parties ("agents with two principals", Hix, 2002), which would be problematic for our analysis. Thus, we have selected all survey questions that were identical in the VAAs of 2009 and 2014; all of them are coded on the basis of a five- point Likert- scale ranging from completely disagree (1) to completely agree (5). Our methodology is structured around our research questions. In a first step, we want to capture the potential for party competition in the European party system. For this purpose, we estimate the position of each transnational political group on four issue areas: redistribution, immigration, same- sex marriage and European integration. This is calculated as the mean position of the national member parties belonging to each transnational party. In order for transnational parties to function as a European level party system, we need to see parties positioning themselves on both sides of the policy issues (pro/contra). We choose these policy areas because they constitute main lines of conflict across Europe. They are issues that European citizens recognize and understand and would be in the position of using to navigate in the European party system. Crucially, the crisis even connected issues such as redistribution - - that until now concerned the national level of policy making- - to the EU level (Katsanidou and Otjes, 2015). Lack of restrictions on immigration is a direct implication of the common market, and hence there is a connection of this issue and EU membership in the minds of citizens (Otjes and Katsanidou, 2016). Finally, the issue of homosexuality is at least in the more conservative countries- - connected to European Court decisions condemning the countries that do not recognize civil partnerships. Thus, citizens perceive the EU as pushing in favor of legalization of same- sex marriage. These four 12

13 issues are coded on the basis of a five- point Likert- scale ranging from completely disagree (1) to completely agree (5). The wording of the questions is: Redistribution: Social programs should not be maintained at the cost of higher taxes Immigration: Immigration [into your country] should be made more restrictive Homosexuals rights: The legalization of same sex marriages is a bad thing European unification: European Integration is a good thing Having established the potential of transnational parties to function as a party system, in a second step, we move on to measuring the internal coherence of transnational parties. To this aim, we use the standard deviation of the positions of all member parties. This simple measure captures ideological coherence: the lower the standard deviation, the more coherent the party group. In this way, we examine which issues are more or less problematic for cooperation and to what extent the crisis had an impact on the ideological coherence of the transnational groups. Given that we can only analyze questions that are either identical or very similar in 2009 and 2014, we use the following issues: Socioeconomic Issue Dimension Social programs should be maintained even at the cost of higher taxes (- ) Government spending should be reduced in order to lower taxes (+) Governments should reduce workers' protection regulations in order to fight unemployment (+) EU issue Dimension European integration is a good thing (+) Individual member states of the EU should have less veto power (+) The European Union should strengthen its security and defense policy (+) On foreign policy issues the EU should speak with one voice (+) The EU should acquire its own tax raising powers (+) Immigration Issue Dimension Immigration [into your country] should be made more restrictive (+) 13

14 Immigrants from outside Europe should be required to accept our culture and values (+) Sociocultural Issue Dimension The legalization of same sex marriages is a good thing (- ) Criminals should be punished more severely (+) Environmental Issue Dimension The promotion of public transport should be fostered through green taxes (+) Renewable sources of energy (e.g. solar or wind energy) should be supported even if this means higher energy costs (+) The third step of our analysis aims to identify which issue dimensions play a role for national political parties decision to join a transnational political group in the EP. Until now, scholars have mainly used descriptive statistics to capture party coherence in the EP (McElroy and Benoit, ). Following McElroy and Benoit, we assume that national parties are free to choose their transnational party group at each EP period. McElroy and Benoit (2007, 2010) find that transnational party groups are fairly cohesive. We take a step further and test which policy dimensions carry more weight in explaining the choice of joining a transnational party group. To do so we create five issue dimensions on the basis of all aforementioned issues. We use them as independent variables to predict choice of joining each of the transnational political groups. We run the analysis using logistic regression, using the same issues as above but grouped in the thematic dimensions (additive indexes). It is important to note that we use an immigration dimension separately to the sociocultural dimension for two reasons: first, compared to criminal punishment and same- sex marriage, immigration has a much more profound impact in the politicization of the EU; second, immigration is a policy issue with both economic and cultural implications. Empirical Results In this section, we will first show our results regarding the existence of a European- level party system by graphically presenting the mean positions of transnational party groups. Then, we will move on to the findings about coherence within transnational 14

15 party groups. Finally, we will present the results of the logistic regression regarding which issue dimensions have more weight for national parties in choosing their transnational political group. Transnational Political Groups Positions First, we examine to what extent we have clear policy differentiation among transnational political groups in the EP. Differences in policy positions among transnational political groups ensure their potential functioning as a party system that enables clear political conflict and, consequently, democratic representation of citizens in the European political arena. Figure 1 and 2 present the position of each transnational group in 2009 and 2014 respectively. We can clearly observe that both sides of each issue are occupied and this holds for both election years. Specifically, Figure 1 shows that in 2009 the EPP, ALDE and ECR supported lower taxes and lower welfare while all the rest advocated in favor of welfare even if it meant higher taxes. Similarly, there is a clear division on the issue of immigration: ECR, EFD and the Alliance of European National Movements support more restrictive immigration, while the Socialists, Greens and GUE/NGL promote less restrictive policy. The EPP and ALDE occupy an unclear middle position. Furthermore, whereas EPP, EFD, and the Alliance are against same- sex marriage, the Socialists, ALDE, Greens and GUE/NGL are in favor; the ECR seems undecided. Finally, on the issue of European unification there is a clear division among the pro- European EPP, Socialists, ALDE and Greens, and the Eurosceptic groups GUE/NGL, EFD and Alliance; ECR is located once again in the middle, which signifies no clear position. Minimal differences notwithstanding, Figure 2 which concerns transnational groups positions in the 2014 election shows a very similar picture. Based on this description the European political space seems to be a healthy system since it allows the expression of positions on both sides of the issues under study. This is an important condition for citizens representation via political parties. Figure 1 about here Figure 2 about here 15

16 Policy Coherence of Transnational Groups The next step is to look at the ideological coherence of each transnational party group. Table 1 presents the standard deviations for each transnational political group on all issues listed in the methods section for the election years 2009 and For ideal ideological coherence the standard deviation should be zero, or as close to zero as possible. This measure shows that all transnational party groups vary between 0 and 12.1, which means that, overall, they are rather ideologically coherent but there are cases where this coherence is shaky. In both years, the EPP, Socialists and ALDE are most coherent (less than 1.0 in standard deviation) on issues of European integration. The Socialist group shows high coherence also on most economic issues, legalization of same- sex marriages and support for renewable sources of energy. The Greens are very coherent on economic issues, legalization of same sex marriage and, as expected, support for renewable sources of energy. Compared to 2009, the Greens show a great extent of improvement of their coherence in The crisis seems to have improved the coherence in issue areas such as the economy, EU integration, immigration, and same- sex marriage. The ECR is one of the transnational groups with low coherence (averaging only a 1.2 standard deviation). The two issues that are over time, consistently the most coherent are EU taxing powers and same sex marriage. However, in eight out of fourteen issues the ECR group improved its coherence over time; these issues are all economy related issues, one EU issue (strengthening the EU security and defense policy), immigration, criminals punishment, and the two environmental issues. This implies that the ECR group used its first term in the parliament well and its members learned from their collaboration. Another transnational group that showed significant improvement in ten out of fourteen issues in 2014 is GUE/NGL. In this case, the issues of improvement concern all economic and European integration issues (except for the EU acquiring its own tax raising powers), as well as immigration and same sex marriage. The crisis brought GUE/NGL members closer to each other and produced a much more coherent party. The EFD/EFFD group shows high coherence on EU integration and immigration issues as well as on same sex marriage. The second term of cooperation of these radical right parties however, did not bring them closer. They seem to have drifted more apart. Finally, the new transnational group 16

17 Alliance/ENF shows a very high level of coherence especially on economic and EU integration issues as well as same sex marriage. Table 1 about here Having presented the descriptive statistics on the existence of a party system at the EU level and the degree of each transnational party groups policy coherence, we now move to the explanatory part of the analysis. To what extent does policy congruence influence the decision of a national party to join a transnational party group as opposed to all other groups? We answer this question by using the six issue dimensions we constructed. Specifically, in Table 2 we present the results of the logistic regression explaining membership in each of the party groups as opposed to any other. A good result for transnational party coherence is when all tested issue dimensions have a statistically significant impact on the decision of joining a specific transnational party group. As the number of observations is low, the table reports up to 0.10 levels of significance. Looking at the results we see that for the Socialists, the economic and the EU dimensions are the most important explanatory factors for joining the Socialist transnational party group. For 2009 they were also the only ones, while in 2014 this changed: immigration, and the sociocultural dimension became statistically significant. For the EPP there are three statistically significant dimensions, economic, EU, and the sociocultural dimension for both years. What changed is that in 2014 the impact of the EU Dimension increased significantly. For members of ALDE the economic dimension was consistent for both years. In 2014 however the transnational party group gained in coherence as the EU, immigration, and environment dimensions became significant. For a party that joined the Greens in 2009 of importance were the economic, immigration and sociocultural dimensions, whereas in 2014 the economic, the EU, and environmental dimensions prevailed. Table 2 about here ECR party members seem to rely on the economic dimension in 2009 and on the EU dimension in For the European Left, central are the economic and EU dimensions, and only in 2009 the environment. For the EFD/EFFD, the EU dimension plays the most 17

18 important role in both election years, while in 2009 significant is also the sociocultural dimension (and in 2014 also the environment, but only slightly). Finally, for ENF in 2014 we find that the role of the economic, EU, and cultural dimensions is only marginally significant. Conclusion Despite that most contemporary policy problems within the EU demand European- level solutions, and that transnational political groups matter greatly in EU law- and policy- making, our conceptual and empirical understanding of democratic politics remains to a large extent confined within national borders. For instance, most studies of representation in the EP examine the linkage between citizens and national parties (McEvoy, 2012; Mattila and Raunio, 2012). Though this research has revealed varied gaps between citizens and elites (e.g. on issues of European unification), it has relied solely on a national- level concept of democratic representation in the EP. Crucially, it has neglected the interaction between national parties and EU- level parties (McElroy and Benoit, 2012; 2010; 2007). This is problematic because the bond between citizens and national parties/candidates or even Members of EP (MEPs) tells us only one part of the story about the linkage between citizens and those legislating on their behalf at the EU level. The reason is that national parties can achieve very little by acting unilaterally: to affect policy outcomes they need to join forces with similar parties from other countries. So after the EP election, the nationally recruited MEPs join European political groups and, when voting on legislation, tend to align with them (e.g. Mühlböck, 2012; Hix et al., 2009). Recent work that studies EP representation as a multilevel phenomenon shows that whether or not national parties join transnational political groups that are close to them ideologically matters greatly for the quality of citizens representation in the EP (Lefkofridi and Katsanidou, 2014); in sum, citizens democratic representation at the EU level is conditioned by the ideological coherence of transnational political groups in the EP. The present study examines whether transnational groups could come up with alternative policy directions to one another and places transnational groups ideological coherence under scrutiny. In particular, it explores patterns of variation across transnational groups, but also across issue areas. We find that in the European 18

19 political space transnational political parties occupy both sides of key political issues investigated: welfare, immigration, same- sex marriage, and EU unification. That is an encouraging starting point signifying that there is potential for the creation of a fully operating party system. Moreover, all transnational groups manifest satisfactory levels of ideological coherence, though there is variation between them. Some transnational groups like the Greens, the Socialists, the European Left, and EFD/EFFD show very high degrees of coherence on almost all issues. Other parties, like the ECR, are coherent in some but not all issues, e.g. those that are less relevant for their core message. We would like to highlight that there is significant variation among issues in terms of coherence. Issues related to European integration offer the most coherent basis for cooperation over time for all transnational parties. Although the European integration issues that we examined here are not decided by the European legislature 3, this finding is very relevant for transnational party cooperation. Also, there is fertile ground for transnational cooperation on economic (for all, but most clearly for Socialists, Greens, GUE/NGL, Alliance/ENF) and immigration- related issues (for the Greens, GUE/NGL, EFD/EFFD, and the Alliance/ENF). What is more, we find that some parties like the EPP and ALDE have become more ideologically coherent over time, when we compare their policy positions in 2009 to those in Based on an analysis of the impact of various issue dimensions on the national party s decision to join a transnational party group, we find that not all issues have the same influence. Comparing across party groups, the most important dimension is the EU. The logistic regression shows that in all cases the EU and the economic dimension play the most important role in choosing which transnational party group to join. Finally, we find that the crisis has clearly left a positive mark. Two transnational party groups (ECR and GUE/NGL) have benefited enormously as manifested by the higher degree of coherence across policy issues. 3 The EU polity issues (tax raising powers and member states veto powers) and the EU policy issues inquired about here (i.e. more integration in the area of foreign, security and defense policy) are issues that remain under member state control and can only be changed through intergovernmental conferences. 19

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