European and National Cleavages: The Santer Vote as a Measure of MEP Independence

The roll-call analysis of the Santer vote might seem to suggest an optimistic assessment of the independence that the Euro-pean Parliament can be expected to enjoy in the use of its new power to confirm the President of the Commission in office. A propensity to vote along transnational, left/right lines and a tendency to follow national divisions of government and opposition have both been shown to have been important, but if anything the former cleavage (87.4 per cent of vote) was more powerful in the Santer vote than the second (79.7 per cent of vote-).

Optimism about MEP independence evaporates, however, on closer inspection of precisely how our two determinants of voting behaviour interact. Table 4 shows all possible combi-nations between the two cleavages. Rows 2 and 3 highlight the 124 MEPs who were subject to cross-pressures between transnational party loyalties and considerations of domestic party politics of government and opposition.

The distinctive manner in which MEPs resolved these conflicting loyalties is of the utmost significance to any understanding of the ability of the EP to act independently of the European Council in endorsing its nominee for the Commission presidency. For what emerges is a critical asymmetry in the political behaviour of MEPs. The experience of the 1994 confirmation vote suggests that they will give priority to the position of their party group in the European Parliament when their national party is in opposition at home. On the other hand, if their national party is in government domestically, they are more likely to support the nominee of the European Council, even against the agreed line of their trans national party group in the EP. The two cells highlighted in Table 4 drive the point home. Sixty-one members of the centre-right groups in the Parliament came from parties in opposition in domestic politics. But only one of these MEPs voted against Santer. By contrast, 63 members of the centre-left groups came from parties in government in national politics. Forty-two of these voted for Santer.

In all, we found that 91.7 per cent of the voting behaviour of MEPs could be explained by means of the following hypothesis.

1. If their parent parties are in government, national delegations will vote for the nominee of the European Council, even if this means going against the majority view of their transantional party group.
2. All MEPs from the country of the nominee will vote for him/her, such is the prize of securing the presidency of the Commission for a compatriot.
3. With the exception of the circumstances in 1) and 2), transnational party solidarity will hold and national delega-tions will follow the group line.

This hypothesis provides a remarkably good fit, the only strong exceptions being the Belgian and Dutch Socialist parties, who would have been expected to vote for Santer under 1). and the Portuguese Socialists, who would have been expected to follow their group line and vote against Santer under 3). Weaker exceptions are provided by the Danish Radical Venstre who chose to abstain, when part 1) of the hypothesis would predict that they would vote for Santer; and by the Portuguese CDS, whose 3 MEPs split all three ways, in spite of a RDE line to vote for Santer. Otherwise, Santer received the support of MEPs from 6 Socialist and 3 Liberal Parties whose parties happened to be in government. Put another way, if an MEP from the PES or ELDR voted for Santer, there was a 79 per cent chance that that person came from a party in government domestically; if an MEP of the PES or ELDR voted against Santer, there was only a 9 per cent chance that that person came from a party of government. We might even go a step further and speculate that the only circumstance in which MEPs subject to contending loyalties will not succumb to the political priorities of a domestic party in power is where they come from a consociational national system where office and issue rewards are even less perfectly linked than normal to perceived governing performance, for that is one possible factor that makes the Belgian and Dutch Socialists distinctive. In other words, it is only where there is limited domestic political liability for cock-ups at the EU level that MEPs from governing parties will feel unconstrained in their use of a power like the confirmation procedure.

The asymmetry we have detected - whereby MEPs from opposition parties have little difficulty in following a transnational group line to support a European Council nominee, while those from government parties find it very hard to hold to a group line to oppose the European Council - translated into a distinctive pattern of party-group cohesion and fragmentation in the Santer vote. Groups that were in any case inclined to support the European Council's nominee were in the luxurious position of being reinforced in their unity by national parties of government in their ranks and undisturbed in their cohesion by national parties of opposition. On the other hand, groups inclined to oppose Santer had to pay a heavy price of disunity on a high profile issue at the beginning of the parliamentary term. As Table 5 shows, Santer was, indeed, confirmed through a combination of a rock-solid vote on the mainstream Right and a fragmentation of the Left; or to be even more exact, through a fragmentation of those groups of the Left containing parties of government, for, tellingly, those unafflicted by this constraint remained united, as predicted by our hypothesis.

The implication of all the above is that, under present conditions, opposition to the European Council's nominee will be structurally more difficult than support. There is a danger that party groups will in the future only be prepared to refuse confirmation if a plausible coalition of groups can be formed which has a combined majority larger than the total number of MEPs within their own ranks who come from nominal parties of government. Assuming that a plausible coalition means one of groups that are contiguous on a left-right scale, this condition in fact implies that under no circumstances since direct elections were first held in 1979 would the European Parliament have ever rejected a European Council nominee for the presidency of the Commission. The Confirmation procedure as it is presently defined would seem to be an empty power.

In 1994 the groups of the Left did at least make an attempt to oppose the Council's nominee for the presidency. However, the procedure as presently framed may even deter groups with national parties of government from doing this in the future. To see why, it should be noted that the cohesion of the transnational groups, although impressive, is precarious. In the absence of the elaborate structures of rewards and sanctions enjoyed by national parties, there is no alternative to building agreements through a permanent process of negotiation. Much depends on goodwill, trust, a psychological commitment to unity and a self-fulfilling belief that consensus will somehow be maintained at the end of the day, sometimes against all evidence to the contrary. In addition, the party groups are still only weakly institutionalized. They have to be reconstituted at the beginning of each parliament and, with the possible exception of the PES, they are not yet firmly bedded down with all national parties certain in their group membership. There is also an enormous turnover of individual MEPs between elections. This means that at the beginning of each term, many MEPs will be new, unsocialized into the unfamiliar contexts of the transnational party groups and fresh from domestic electoral battles that may deepen loyalties to national parties. In July 1994, new members, in fact, out-numbered the re-elected by 321 to 246.

A further reason why the groups are unlikely to take risks with their reputation for cohesion has to do with the distinctive manner in which the balance of political influence is determined within the Parliament. Given that most of the Parliament's powers can only be exercised at all on an absolute majority of the EP's membership, much of its work depends upon the predictable organization of majorities across party groups. At all levels of activity from the committees of the Parliament to the plenaries, agenda setting and eventual decisions are critically shaped by face-to-face bargaining between representatives of the groups. Although things may occasionally be settled by votes weighted by the numerical strength of each group, decisions are more normally taken by a process of consensus - in which 'political feel' for the relative ability of each group to mobilize a cohesive cohort of MEPs has to be weighed in the calculus of influence against paper strength. This may be especially so in the conference of group presidents, which Martin Westlake describes as 'the dominant political power base in the post-Maastricht Parliament'.

In July 1994, Pauline Green is believed to have given her group a stern warning of the risks that it might be taking in opposing Santer. If true, this would tend to confirm the arguments that are being advanced here: that the party groups will be peculiarly averse to risk at the beginning of a parliamentary term, just when the confirmation procedure requires them to be otherwise, and this effect may be powerfully constraining because the procedure is uneven in the way in which it distributes political risks, maximizing them for those groups inclined to oppose the Council's nominee for the presidency of the Commission, minimizing them for those wanting to support the Council.