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Tracing the selection bias in roll call votes: party group cohesion in the European Parliament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2014

Nikoleta Yordanova  and
Monika Mühlböck
Nikoleta Yordanova*
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
Monika Mühlböck
Affiliation:
Department of Economic Sociology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
*
*E-mails: yordanova@uni-mannheim.de, mo.muehlboeck@univie.ac.at
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Abstract

Legislative politics scholars rely heavily on roll call vote (RCV) data. However, it has been claimed that strategic motives behind RCV requests lead to overestimating party group cohesion and, thus, biased findings on legislative behaviour. To explore this claim, we distinguish between two types of bias, a ‘behavioural bias’ and a ‘selection bias’. A recent rule change in the European Parliament, making RCVs mandatory on all final legislative votes, presents the unique opportunity to evaluate the latter. We compare party group cohesion in requested and mandatory RCVs by examining final legislative votes before and after the rule adoption using amendment RCVs (which still need to be requested) as a benchmark. The analysis shows that group cohesion is higher whenever RCVs are not just requested on some but mandatory on all votes. Hence, there is indeed a ‘selection bias’ in RCV data. Yet, somewhat contrary to former claims, relying on requested RCVs leads to underestimation of the cohesion party groups would have had were all votes automatically roll called. We argue that this is mainly because requests occur on more contentious votes.

Keywords

roll call votesparty groupsEuropean Parliament
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 373 - 399
Copyright
© European Consortium for Political Research 2014 

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Footnotes

a

The order of the authors’ names reflects the principle of rotation. Both authors have contributed equally to all work.

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