Serving two masters: Party representation in the European Parliament

Modern Democracy, Schattschneider (1941) contends, is "unthinkable save in terms of political parties." As in all modern democratic systems, the role of political parties is crucial for the development of political representation in the European Union. The primary goal of this dissertation is to explore to what extent political parties contribute to the development of political representation through the direct channel of the European Parliament. In particular, I confront the challenges resulting from the distinct two-level European party system in which members of the European Parliament have membership to both the national and European parties, which have different representational foci.; When making a voting decision, members of the European Parliament are affected by both their national and European parties. Depending on individual members' strategic considerations of their reelection and the role as national or European representatives, they decide different levels of support for their parties at both national and European levels. Meanwhile, European voters in the complicated two-level party system have difficulty in developing a clear expectation about how exactly the policies proposed in the elections to the European Parliament can be implemented in the European decision making process. They choose a party in the elections to the European Parliament depending on their newly developed assessments of the legislative effectiveness of parties in European decision making, rather than their preferences on policies at the European level.; Theorizing in these ways about European voters and the voting behavior of members of the European Parliament, this dissertation focuses on the role of national parties rather than the European parties in linking European voters' electoral choices to European public policy. Two main hypotheses are: First, European voters decide their support for a party among national parties of their member states from the assessments of the legislative effectiveness of them in the European decision-making process. Second, national parties in the EP develop different degrees of the legislative effectiveness in the European decision making process through their members' relative weights on the national and European representational foci, which result from their members' responsiveness to European voters' electoral choices.; Relying on a simple spatial model, this dissertation suggests a novel way of disentangling the individual members' relative weights on the representational foci and advances to develop a new measure of national party cohesion in the European decision making process. Using the newly developed measure, the two hypotheses are empirically tested with data covering from the first to the fifth European Parliament.; Results confirm the first hypothesis by showing European voters have used the assessments of their national parties' legislative performance in European decision making. Challenging the influential Second-Order model (Reif and Schmitt 1980), which ignores the European factors in the elections to the European Parliament, the results provide empirical evidence that Europe does matter to voters' choices in the EP elections. The second hypothesis is also confirmed. Depending on voters' electoral choices, members of the European Parliament have changed the levels of support for either of their parties, which results in varying degrees of national party cohesion in the European decision making process. This result extends Hix's (2004) institutional approach on the Parliamentary members' voting behavior. Overall, this dissertation is the first scholarly effort to fully analyze the role of political parties in linking voters' electoral choices and European decisions. To the extent the analyses in this dissertation have significant implication not only for literature on the European elections and the European Parliament respectively, but also for studies of the system of political representatio...