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This article analyzes the voting behavior of Euro-parliamentarians. The roll-call data from the plenary sessions of the European Parliament (EP) during the third and fourth legislatures are used to estimate legislators' preferences. Applying the spatial models of roll-call voting to the EP, I investigate the dimensions underlying legislators' voting behavior. I focus on the relative importance of ideology (i.e. European-wide political party affiliation) versus nationality as the main factor influencing voting behavior. The results support the existence of a European political system in which the main actors are political groups, not national delegations. Also, the pattern of voting in the EP is found to be quite stable across time and issues. Moreover, after taking into account Members' political party affiliations, nationality becomes, though to a lesser extent, statistically significant in explaining legislators' ideal positions.

We review the literature on the rise of identity politics and populism in Europe. Populist parties have gained large vote shares since the Great Recession of 2008. We observe in many countries, and even in the European Parliament, a transformation of the main dimension of politics from the left–right cleavage to a new cleavage opposing the mainstream parties to populist parties. We examine how this transformation relates to changes in voter attitudes and the adjustment of political parties to these changes. Two main types of causes for the rise of populism have emerged: economic and cultural. In reviewing the evidence, we find a complex interaction between economic and cultural factors. Economic anxiety among large groups of voters related to the Great Recession and austerity policies triggers a heightened receptivity to the messages of cultural backlash from populist parties.

Why do legislators switch party? We seek to identify whether "party switching" is mainly determined by power (to join a more influential party) or ideology (to join a party with closer policy goals). We focus on the 557 cases of political group switching in the European Parliament between 1979 and 2014. We find that most of these cases were from smaller, more marginal, and oppositional groups, to larger, more pivotal, and governing groups. Nevertheless, we also find that ideological congruence (between an MEP and his or her prospective group) was an important determinant of political group switching.

This study uses roll-call voting data from 16 legislatures to investigate how the institutional context of politics—such as whether a country is a parliamentary or presidential regime, or has a single-party, coalition or minority government—shapes coalition formation and voting behavior in parliaments. It uses a geometric scaling metric to estimate the "revealed space" in each of these legislatures and a vote-by-vote statistical analysis to identify how much of this space can be explained by government-opposition dynamics as opposed to parties' (left-right) policy positions. Government-opposition interests, rather than parties' policy positions, are found to be the main drivers of voting behavior in most institutional contexts. In contrast, issue-by-issue coalition building along a single policy dimension is only found under certain restrictive institutional constraints: presidential regimes with coalition governments or parliamentary systems with minority governments. Put another way, voting in most legislatures is more like Westminster than Washington.

We examined how voting behavior in the European Parliament changed after the European Union added ten new member‐states in 2004. Using roll‐call votes, we compared voting behavior in the first half of the Sixth European Parliament (July 2004‐December 2006) with voting behavior in the previous Parliament (1999–2004). We looked at party cohesion, coalition formation, and the spatial map of voting by members of the European Parliament. We found stable levels of party cohesion and interparty coalitions that formed mainly around the left‐right dimension. Ideological distance between parties was the strongest predictor of coalition preferences. Overall, the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 did not change the way politics works inside the European Parliament. We also looked at the specific case of the controversial Services Directive and found that ideology remained the main predictor of voting behavior, although nationality also played a role.

In this article we examine the determinants of European Union (EU) migration policies. We look at the passage of six pieces of migration and immigrant integration legislation in the fifth European Parliament (1999–2004). Based on the sixty-one roll-call votes on these bills we create a "migration score" for each Member of the European Parliament. We then use regression analysis to investigate the determinants of these scores. We find that the strongest determinants of policy outcomes on migration issues in this arena are the left-right preferences of EU legislators. These are stronger predictors than the economic preferences of national parties' constituents or the economic interests or political preferences of the member states.

In this paper we study the voting behavior of the Czech Parliament members. First, we show that low-dimensionality characterizes conflict in the Czech Parliament. The first, and dominant dimension is the classical left-right dimension, whereas the second dimension, when significant, expresses attitude toward European integration. Second, we document the party development in the Czech Parliament and show evidence of convergence to a Western European type parliamentary democracy. We show that this is mainly a result of political parties' use of reward and punishment strategies to discipline their members. Highly disciplined members were awarded with better ranking in the party list for the subsequent elections. We also find that the electors are, though indirectly, interested in roll call voting behavior of their representatives.