What Role for the Whips?
A Latent-Variable Approach to Leadership Effects on Party
∗
Group Cohesion in the European Parliament
Paper presented at the panel “The European Parliament and the making of
a supranational elite” of the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Helsinki,
May 7-11, 2007
Stefanie Bailer†
Tobias Schulz
Peter Selb
April 24, 2007
Abstract
Previous research has identified several structural factors that affect
party group cohesion in parliamentary voting behaviour. In contrast,
the potential significance of leadership has been neglected so far. Utilising these structural factors, we apply a latent variable approach to
model leadership effects in roll-call data from the European Parliament (EP), 1979–2001. Other things being equal, we find that party
leaders significantly differ in the proneness to suffer avoidable losses
in roll call votes. However, these differences can hardly be explained
by leadership traits such as experience and strategic positioning as
we measure them. It therefore stands to reason that leadership skills
elude themselves from easy quantification.
∗
We are particularly grateful to Simon Hix and Björn Hoyland who provided his data for
this study. In addition, we’d like to thank the participants of workshops at the University
of Zurich and the “Dreiländertagung” in Vienna (November/December 2006) for helpful
discussions.
†
All authors are affiliated to the Center for Comparative and International Studies, University of Zürich. Please address correspondence to Stefanie Bailer, Seilergraben 53, 8001
Zürich, tel: +41 (0)44 634 39 79, fax: +41 (0)44 634 43 60, [email protected]
1
The tools of parliamentary leadership are not a set of mechanistic
forces which go into effect automatically, but resources which are
utilised, with discretion or foolhardiness, by leaders. In short,
leaders are human beings who bring to the performance of their
leadership roles their strengths (or lack) of personal skills and
abilities (Longley and Hazan, 2000, 10).
1
Introduction
The recent change to the statute of the group of the European People’s
Party in the European Parliament officially allowing the British Tories to
have a deviating view on the European Constitution underlined again that
this largest group in the EP suffers from ideological heterogeneity.1 However,
recent studies of the transnational party groups in the European Parliament
have found that this group as well as other EP party groups show an astonishingly high degree of cohesion considering that they comprise a large
number of different parties and nations of the EU (Hix, 2002; Hix, Noury
and Roland, 2003; Kreppel, 2002). The high cohesion of the party groups
amazes, as the ideological distance within the party groups differs considerably: an analysis of party manifestos by Pennings (2002) demonstrates that
the national parties united in the Socialist group of the EP as well as the
group of Green parties are ideologically closer than the Conservative group
of the European People’s Party. However, all groups show a similar level of
cohesion.
Theoretically, one would not expect such a high level of coherent voting
behaviour of MEPs because, apart from their transnational party group, they
have to consider their national party as well as their constituency as additional principals (Bailey and Brady, 1998; Epstein and O’Halloran, 1999; McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984; Moe, 1984). Moreover, national parties control
access to the EP seats, but MEPs have to work within transnational groups
as soon as they become members. Existing research on party group unity
has so far focused on a list of explanatory variables ranging from ideology to
institutions but at the same time it has paid surprisingly little attention to
the role of party leaders or party whips in securing discipline in party groups.
At most, several case studies illustrate the effect of single party leaders on
their parties, but there is hardly any literature on the comparative effects
of party leaders on their groups. In this piece of research, we are going to
present a latent variable approach to the influence of party leaders on voting
cohesion in the EP, 1979–2001.
1
see www.euractiv.com, 13/02/2004.
2
In the following section 2, we will summarise previous theoretical claims
and empirical findings on the structural factors that potentially affect party
group cohesion. These factors will serve as control variables in our empirical model in order to approximate ceteris paribus conditions for the party
group leaders. Further, leadership characteristics that could be argued to
explain success of leaders are laid out in section 3. Subsequently, we will
briefly describe our data in section 4 and in section 5 we will explain how
to incorporate the various independent variables in a multi-level regression
model. Section 6 presents and interprets statistical results. The final section
summarises and concludes.
2
Structural determinants of party cohesion
Many structural factors have been theorised and empirically demonstrated
to impinge on party group cohesion. First, party groups differ in their ideological coherence so that differing degrees of party discipline are necessary to
ensure unity (Cox and McCubbins, 1991). Officially, a deputy is only obliged
to follow his conscience in many parliaments, if his ideology is not the same
as the party group line (Heidar and Koole, 2000b). However, a party leader
will always try to ensure that a party group member is motivated to follow
the official line in order to ensure necessary majorities. Thus, the higher the
ideological homogeneity of a party group, the fewer measures are needed by
a party group to ensure discipline (Bowler, Farrell and Katz, 1999). Some
evidence suggests that left–wing party groups are more cohesive than liberals or conservative parties. For example, Damgaard (1995) claims that ex–
Communist parties are more disciplined than liberal or conservative groups.
Similarly, Pennings (2002) shows that EP party groups have different levels
of cohesion with the left–wing and green parties exhibiting higher levels than
the Conservatives.
Second, the size of the party group has been claimed to affect cohesion
(Best and Heller, 2005; Heidar and Koole, 2000a). The number of party
group members can have different effects. On the one hand the sheer number
of parliamentarians increases the coordination and monitoring costs (Olson,
1968) and the probability that differing views will occur. However, the size
of a party group also determines the financial and staff means of a party
group, because the European Parliament financially supports party groups
according to size (Raunio, 2000b). A large party group therefore disposes
over a larger array of sanctioning mechanisms because it is better able to
control positions such as the EP president, committee positions or attractive
jobs such as rapporteurships (Hausemer, 2005; Kaeding, 2004). Defecting
3
deputies in smaller groups do not have to fear to lose as much as deputies
from larger groups because smaller groups cannot provide as many incentives
for compliance as big groups.
Moreover, the European Parliament is currently composed of 25 nations
and over 170 parties. Thus, it stands to reason that party groups that include a higher number of parties and a higher number of nations are more
difficult to coordinate. For example, the European People’s Party/European
Democrats encompasses parties from all 25 member states and 38 parties.
The Union for a Europe of Nations, on the other hand, comprises just eleven
nations and parties. Party groups thus face a strategic choice between inviting parties to join their group and thus make them more powerful and having to ensure party unity. The European People’s Party Group experienced
this problem quite distinctly when they had invited the Italian party ”Forza
Italia” to join them in 1999. A substantial group of Christian democrat
parties from Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and other states
opposed this move and thus posed a substantial challenge for the EPP leader
Pöttering.2
A similar argument can be made with respect to the development of the
European Parliament over time. For example, Hix, Noury and Roland (2005)
include indicator variables of the EU enlargement periods into their model,
to demonstrate that the larger the Union, the more difficult it will get to
produce cohesive voting behaviour.
Unfortunately, all the measures related to the factors mentioned before
(number of parties and states and enlargement rounds), are highly correlated with ideological heterogeneity or partisan fractionalisation of the party
groups. Hence, we will not consider them in our analysis (compare section
5)
The evolution of the European Parliament can also be described, however,
by looking at when the powers and competences of the EU parliament have
widened considerably. The Single European Act, and the Maastricht and
Amsterdam Treaties are the notable milestones in this process. However, the
direction of the potential consequences are unclear. On the one hand, it may
be hypothesised that the growing significance of the EP has provided party
groups with further incentives to coordinate and monitor their members’
activities. On the other hand, it may be claimed that the widened scope
of EU legislation has fostered the intervention of national principals, thus
rendering voting behaviour less coherent.
Third, party leaders in the EP are usually recruited from the biggest
national parties and member states in order to ensure that they have a better
2
see Agence Europe, Bulletin Quotidien, No.7607, 4/12/1999.
4
and more direct control over a large share of MEPs in their groups. We
would therefore expect, for example, that a German party group leader is
better able to control the German members of the group due to the closer
connection between these MEPs and better knowledge of their viewpoints.
More generally, we hypothesise that party group cohesion is positively linked
with the share of MEPs from a leader’s national party within the group.
The extent to which a national party is able to influence the cohesion
of a transnational party group may also depend on whether the party is
represented in a respective national government (Faas, 2003). Governments
can function as additional principals if they consider parliamentarians as
supporters of their policies. Hix and Lord (1995) demonstrate this kind of
pressure using the example of the election of Jacques Santer as President of
the European Commission. In this election, national governments exerted
influence on the MEPs of their countries in order to ensure the victory of
the candidate whom they had already chosen in the Council of Ministers.
Moreover this is illustrated by the spectacular failures of EU laws such as
the Takeover Directive in 2001 which was vetoed in the EP due to the German
government pressure on the German MEPs. Hix, Noury and Roland (2003)
find out that members in the European Parliament who are from parties
in government have a positive influence on party cohesion. It seems that
governments exert pressure on parliamentarians from their party to ensure
the final adoption of laws in the EP, which they have already agreed on in
the Council of Ministers. However, the pressure from national governments
can go too far as in the case of Pauline Green, leader of the Socialist party
group. Due to her closeness to instructions from her national party during
the Commission crisis in 1999, she was forced to stand down as leader of her
group (Judge and Earnshaw, 2003).
3
Leadership Determinants of Party Cohesion
Political leadership research in the political science literature often starts
with references to Max Weber’s (1921) seminal observations on the effects of
charisma. Weber (1921) referred to exceptional individual personality traits
of a leader which allow him to rule. Such qualities would be subsumed under
the personality–centred theories of the leadership approaches (Helms, 2000).
Helms (2000) distinguishes between structural, personality–focused, and “interactionist” approaches in order to structure the wide literature on the role
of leaders in political science. Whereas the structural oriented approaches do
5
not allow for a significant role of personality traits, but rather underline the
influence of the limiting factors of governmental systems such as parliamentarism in contrast to presidentialist systems, the personality–focused studies
concentrate on exceptional, individual characteristics of leaders such as the
Weberian charisma or their leadership skills. Furthermore, we can subsume
studies which study leadership styles under the label of personality–focused
approaches. They underline the reconciling, arbitrating qualities of leaders
such as the ability to deal with party relations (Kaarbo, 1997).
Interactionist approaches try to combine these two strands of research and
postulate that leaders have a possibility to develop personal leadership styles
within an environment constrained by institutions. The question which of
the personal characteristics matters often depends on the institutional set–up
in which leaders act (Helms, 2000).
In our case, the interactionist approach of leadership research seems most
appropriate.3 Within the confines of the European Parliament rules, the
party group leaders enjoy the possibility to show certain leadership traits in
order to achieve their goal of maximum party group cohesion. Amongst the
wide variety of leadership characteristics cited in the literature, we consider
the following as particularly relevant for parliamentary group leaders:
3.1
Charisma
Qualities described by Weber (1921) as extraordinary, practically holy, heroic,
and idealistic characterise exceptional personalities whose talents enable them
to lead by their personal charm and persuasiveness. The problem of this
concept is the difficulty to measure it. van der Brug and Mughan (2007)—
when analysing Dutch party leaders amongst whom Pim Fortuyn—use in one
instance the frequency how often journalists mention the word “charisma”
when writing about certain party leaders and in another case thermometer
scores of population surveys. One the other hand, one could argue, and this
is our point of departure, that charisma belongs to the sort of leadership
skills that elude themselves from direct measurement and therefore have to
be modelled as latent variables or residual categories.
3
Given all this, we have to acknowledge that party leadership in parliament must not be
limited to activities to influence voting behaviour of the party’s MEPs on the floor directly.
Rather, a party leader could also try to exert influence in the preparatory committees to
prevent bills that are disputed within her own party group to appear at the floor in its
current form (Cox and McCubbins, 2005). This could be done by either blocking the bill
in the committee and sending it back to the commission or by amending the bill before it
appears at the floor. However, the ability to do so might rise with experience, as described
below.
6
More modern approaches now underline also the effect of “non-charismatic”
leadership such as the skill to mediate conflict within the party (Ansell and
Fish, 1999).
3.2
Experience
The former experience of a parliamentary group leader can determine his interest in a certain policy issue and it can also influence his knowledge and skill
how to deal with certain situations such as intra-party conflicts, international
crises etc. (Kaarbo, 1997). Theoretically, experience is to be distinguished
from expertise which encompasses information advances, as well as knowledge on policy content, process details in negotiations and information about
the preferences of others (Wall and Lynn, 1993). In the case of parliamentary group leaders we consider the knowledge about the preferences of the
party group members as most crucial ability of party leaders in order to
achieve consensus in the party group. This expertise on the preferences of
party group members is bound to grow with experience. The longer party
group leaders know their colleagues, the more knowledge they have gathered,
the better they may be able to predict the preferences of their fellow parliamentarians. Thus, we assume that expertise on preferences in based on
experience so that both characteristics denote the same leadership quality.
However, we distinguish between extra- and intra-parliamentary experience.
The European parliamentary group leaders do differ to the extent of having national or European Union political experience. Some of them such
as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing or Wilfried Martens had led executives before
joining the European Parliament, whereas others like Pat Cox or Hans-Gert
Pöttering have concentrated their whole career on the EU level. Therefore,
extra-parliamentary experience denotes political experience gathered by a
governmental function as minister or prime minister in which certain qualities such as the possibility to identify compromises or to influence colleagues
are already trained. Intra-parliamentary research describes experience collected in the European Parliament by having been a member in a number
of committees and delegations or by having served a considerable amount of
time.
3.3
Leadership Style
Undoubtedly, the leadership style of a parliamentary group leader has the potential to increase the party cohesion by establishing party discipline (Barber,
1966). In an extensive study of leadership styles, Kaarbo (1997) as well as
Kaarbo and Hermann (1998) distinguish between several strategies which
7
characterise the leadership of European executive leaders. These are strategies for dealing with conflict (confrontational versus consensual), for managing information and for dealing with party factions and other parties. Especially when looking at the role of parliamentary executive leaders, the issue
how they achieve cohesion plays a role. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
showed a rather combative style being very controversial with party group
members who did not agree with her, whereas her successor John Major
developed a more consensual party management style (Kaarbo, 1997, 569).
Unfortunately, we are not in the position to repeat a similar exercise because
the relevant data would not be available due to a lack of publicity of European party leaders in the media. In the study by Kaarbo and Hermann
(1998), information on leadership styles was collected by content analysing
over interview responses of European executive leaders, e.g. Chancellor Helmut Kohl or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In contrast, we do not have
access to such a wide base of interviews of European parliamentary leaders
in order to carry out a similar study.
Linked to the question with which kind of communication style a party
leader deals with the party, the position of the leader within the party plays
a role. On the one hand we can expect a leader as being a representative
of the party median, on the other hand, ”spatial leadership” research gives
evidence of political outsiders becoming US presidents (Helms, 2000, 421).
However, in parliamentary systems and in the case of party group leaders
whose duty is to guarantee cohesion, we assume that an ideological position
close to the opinion median of the party group facilitates to mediate the
conflicting parties.4
3.4
Career Prospects
The personal goals of a leader—as in the case of any deputy—are bound to
determine his behaviour. Legislative research terms this idea the “last period problem”, describing the situation of deputies in their last parliamentary
phase who are not motivated for reelection and will therefore behave differently than younger colleagues heading for a future career (Zupan, 1990). In
our case, we can distinguish between European parliamentary leaders at the
end of their career, like Wilfried Martens who served as chairman of the
European People’s Party after having been Belgian Prime Minister for 13
4
The ideological position of the leader is also addressed by Cox and McCubbins (1993)
who argue that the party (group) has an incentive to elect a leader that is at the centre
of the distribution of ideological positions within the party, since he is suspected to best
internalise the collective goals of the party as such. Taking up the position should not
hinder or even boost his reelection chances.
8
years. Quite in contrast, the Green party leader (1999–2001) Heidi Hautala
took over this position when she was 44 years old and heading for a political
career either in the EP or in her home country Finland. Since 1999 Hautala
stood twice as presidential candidate in Finland and is now leading the Green
parliamentary group in the Finnish parliament.
4
Data
After having identified some of the most important structural as well as
leadership factors that may affect party group cohesion in roll call voting
behaviour, we will first present our major data source before we carry on
with issues of operationalisation. The data matrix that we apply to examine
the personality of the party leaders as a latent variable builds on data on the
roll call votes in the European Parliament that has been collected by Hix,
Noury and Roland (2006) as well as on data on the characteristics of the
party groups compiled by Hix, Noury and Roland (2005).5
The roll call data includes virtually all roll call votes in the European
Parliament from July 1979 until April 2004. For each legislature there are
three data–files available: one for the characteristics of the representatives,
one for the characteristics of all the votes and one for the records of the
voting behaviour of all members of parliament in each vote. This data is
very complete (only a few votes are missing) and hence, we are even able to
observe the voting behaviour of up to twelve party groups over all legislatures.
However, the second data set that allows us to measure certain characteristics
of the fractions, contains data for only six party groups: The European
People’s Party / European Democrats (E), the Socialists (S), the Greens
(V), the Liberals (L), the Communists (M) and the Progressive European
Democrats (G). In addition, this second source contains data only until 2001.
Therefore, we are not able to extend our analysis beyond this year for the
time being.
What we also employ in the analysis are variables that measure the characteristics of the different leaders. This data we have collected ourselves since
it is readily available.
5
We’d like to express our gratitude to those authors for sharing their data with us.
9
5
A latent variable approach to leadership effects
Within the European Parliament, the position of group chair is of considerable importance (Judge and Earnshaw, 2003), because the chair has to
ensure consensual and collective decision-making within the group, followed
by his duties to represent the party group in external dealings, e.g. in the
EP’s Conference of Presidents. Little is known, however, on how successful
the party group leaders are in accomplishing their tasks. The ultimate goal
of this paper is to determine the role that party group leaders play in the
production of cohesive voting behaviour among party group members in the
European Parliament.
Our goal is partly descriptive in the sense that although we do have
some theoretical expectations as to which and how leaders’ traits promote
or hamper cohesion, we acknowledge that leadership cannot be captured
by these explanations entirely. Instead, we expect some leadership skills to
remain that we were not able to identify and thus can only be modelled as a
latent variable that primarily becomes manifest in the outcomes, i.e. in the
party group cohesiveness of roll call votes.
Therefore, after having identified and operationalised the structural factors that make it more or less difficult for leaders to close the ranks within
their party groups, it will be interesting so see how successful we will be in
capturing leadership effects using the leadership factors identified in section
3.
Keeping the structural factors constant across party group leaders in an
empirical model of party cohesion will allow us to judge whether leadership
actually makes a difference as to cohesive voting behaviour. Employing the
variables at the level of the leader will further reveal whether they exert some
additional influence on cohesion and whether this decreases the variability of
the leaders’ effects. If this is actually the case, we would be able to conclude
that the theories laid out above contribute to our understanding what kind of
leaders are more likely to sustain party coherence. On the other hand, if the
inclusion of the leader-variables does not result in such effects, the suspicion
rises that leadership withdraws from being measured directly but rather is a
multi-faceted and poorly understood concept that has to be modelled as a
latent variable.
Intuitively, our dependent variable should measure the cohesiveness of
the voting behaviour of a fraction (or party group) k for a single roll call
vote i. This approach is also applied by Carey (2007) in his examination of
party discipline across countries. However, Carey (2007, 96) also proposes a
10
different measure that we think is more appropriate for the examination of
leadership effects in the current context: it basically amounts to an indicator
variable that identifies for each leader (or fraction, respectively) and each
vote, whether the leader was unsuccessful in the sense that she lost the vote
(the result was the opposite of what she opted for) although she could have
won if all party group members had followed her, given the voting behaviour
of all the MEPs from the remaining party groups. In order to tab potential
leadership effects, we introduce an intermediate level of analysis j that is
specific to leaders within party groups.
To compile this measure, one has to be able to identify the majority
threshold for every vote in order to judge whether the defecting party group
members actually made a difference with respect to the final outcome. There
are basically two majority requirements in the EP, namely the simple majority of votes cast (disregarding the abstentions) and the qualified majority,
i.e. half of the MEP that hold office at that moment. Our data allows us to
identify whether for a given vote single or qualified majority was required.
The first step is therefore to compute for each vote and party group whether
the leader lost the vote due to a breakdown of party unity in her group. This
variable (RLOSERijk ) takes the value “1” if the leader voted “Yea” but the
outcome was “No” and the number of MEP from all party groups voting
“Yea” together with the members of the group of the leader examined that
voted “No” is bigger than the majority threshold. It also takes the value
“1” for the opposite configuration in which the leader voted “No” but the
outcome was “Yea” and the number of MEP voting “Yea” minus the number of MEP from the leaders’ party that were also positive is smaller than
the majority threshold. However, we deviate from Carey’s (2007) definition
insofar, as we counted abstentions as well as absences as votes against the
leader.
Given all this, our measure allows us to answer the two crucial questions of
this piece of research. First: do the party group leaders differ in their proneness of suffering losses due to breakdown of party unity, given the structural
conditions (as defined by the bottom-level covariates of the model and the
random party group intercept) he or she was confronted with? Second: can
this effect be explained by variables derived from the current literature on
leadership?
Of course, if the probability of loosing a vote due to lacking party discipline is the dependent variable, the closeness of the decision must be included
into the regression equation as a control since the closer the vote the more
likely it is that defecting party members will influence the outcome.
11
log
P (RLOSERijk )
1 − P (RLOSERijk )
= (β0 + ζ1j + ζ2k ) + β1 Xijk + β2 Zij + β3 Wik + ijk
(1)
where Xijk is a vector of proposition-specific covariates such as the closeness
of the vote (as explained above) and of time-varying factors that potentially
affect the European Parliament as a whole such as the Single European Act
the Maastricht Treaty and the Amsterdam Treaty.6 Dummy-variables that
identify different enlargement rounds have been dropped since they substantially are captured by the following variables.
Wik is a vector of time-varying attributes of the party groups such as party
group size, the ideological diversity and the share of national governmental
parties for each group.7 Since they are highly correlated with partisan fractionalisation, we have included neither the number of parties or states in a
party group nor the national fractionalisation of the group.
ζ2k is a normally distributed random intercept at the level of party groups
with variance σ22 , and is included into the model to absorb any potential timeinvariant, unobserved heterogeneity between the party groups.
Zij includes a single structural factor that is specific to proposition–party
leader dyads, namely the share of party group members from the leaders’
national parties (share of leader’s national fraction).
At the level of the leader, we include variables that measure aspects of
the leader characteristics laid out in section 3 as the years a leader had already served in the European parliament before she became a leader (years
in EP ) the number of committees and delegations she was engaged in before
having taken up leadership and similarly two dummy variables accounting
for the fact whether a party leader had ever served as committee head headed
committees or in an official EP position (EP position experience) before becoming EP Group President. A third indicator variable identifies whether
in the past a leader had been a member of a national government or not
(previous government experience).
6
Those are operationalised as dummy variables which are each coded as 0 until the
event occurs and as 1 thereafter. For the Single European Act this is January 1987, for
the Maastricht Treaty it is January 1993 and for the Amsterdam Treaty January 1999.
7
Again, we have taken over the operationalisation from Hix, Noury and Roland (2005)
for the latter two variables. The share of the governmental parties in a group is compiled from information contained in Müller and Strøm (2003). The measure of “ideology
diversity” is based on data taken from Budge et al. (2001): for each national party, the
absolute value of the difference between its left-right position and the weighted mean of
the party group is multiplied with the share of the national party in the respective party
group. The “ideological diversity” of a group is then the sum of all these values.
12
Remaining, time-invariant leader characteristics are considered as potentially constitutive of leadership skills, and are—consistent with our latent
variable approach—subsumed into ζ1j , the leader-specific deviation from the
overall intercept β0 . ζ1j is assumed to be normally distributed with variance
σ12 .
ζ1j and ζ2k are assumed to be uncorrelated. Finally, ijk is an independent
and normally distributed error term, and the β’s are parameters to estimate.
Given that the dependent variable is dichotomous, we have to fit a generalised
linear model.8
In the course of the estimation of the model it turned out that convergence of the maximisation algorithm remained difficult. We hence decided
to centre the independent variables around their means (every dependent
variable employed actually measures the deviation from the mean).
6
Empirical findings
Table 1 summarises the results of the random-intercepts model of party group
cohesion described in the previous section. The first model (1) is an estimation of nothing but the random intercepts of the two levels (groups and
leaders). As can be seen from the lower panel of the table, the estimated
variance of the party group intercepts is significant at the five per cent significance level. The variance of the leader intercepts, on the other hand, is
even highly significant at the 1 per cent significance level. Hence, we are
confident to conclude that there actually are effects of both the groups and
in particular the leaders on the probability of having a vote defeated due to
breakdown of unity.
However, if we go to the second model in the next column (2), obviously,
not many of the structural factors exert a highly significant influence. Not
surprisingly, closeness yields a highly significant and obviously strong positive
effect on the probability to lose the vote due to lacking party unity. This
control simply demonstrates that the closer the vote, the higher the impact
of defecting party members.
The first substantial insight from the model, however, is that the size of
the party group increases the probability of an avoidable loss, keeping other
factors constant. Thus, the larger the group, the more difficulties the leader
has in disciplining the members. This remains the single most important
factor on the level of the party groups since it is the only one that becomes
highly significant.
8
We have used Stata’s gllamm procedure to estimate the parameters, which relies on
the Newton-Raphson algorithm.
13
Apart from the partisan fractionalisation of the party group, which has
only a slightly significant positive effect, all other party group level covariates as the ideological fractionalisation, the share of the MEP from national
governmental parties or the share of the leaders’ national fraction fail from
becoming significant and thus are not contributing to our understanding of
why a group experiences an avoidable loss of a vote.
On the other hand, agreement was generally harder to achieve after the
Single European Act and interestingly, the subsequent major legislative milestones (Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties) resulted in generally less risk of
lacking party unity. Particularly the effect of the Maastricht Treaty is highly
significant and rather strong in comparison.
Given the explanatory power of our structural variables, we have to be
sceptical about whether with the fixed part of the model we have captured
all substantial parts of the variance of the dependent variable. However, the
most interesting question we aim at answering with this study is whether
there can be found additional effects for the fractions and in particular the
leaders. If we look again at the random part of the model in the lower
panel of table 1, what is most striking is that the variance of the random
party group intercepts has ceased from being significant. Obviously, our
structural variables—which vary over time, i.e. between legislatures or even
propositions—actually capture all the effects that might be fraction-specific.
This fosters our argument that it might be particularly worthwhile to look
more closely at effects specific to the leaders.
Indeed, the random intercept component on the level of the leaders is
still highly significant, which indicates that there is a perceivable influence
of party group leaders on party group coherence. As laid out in section 5,
the random intercept estimate is not a point estimate but rather describes
the distribution of a random variable, i.e. the deviation of the leaders from
the overall intercept of the regression.
Unfortunately, the inclusion of the leader characteristics in our multi-level
model does not reveal any significant effect, as can be seen from column (3)
of table 1.9 Since the variation of the random intercept at this level is still
9
We also decided to use the random intercepts of model (2) in table 1 as a dependent
variable and the leader characteristics as predictors. Lewis and Linzer (2005) suggest
feasible generalised least squares (FGLS) in the case in which the dependent variable is an
estimated variable which is based on varying numbers of observations per unit of analysis
(leaders). FGLS allows to incorporate the known variance of the dependent variable to
derive an estimate of the variance of the remaining component of the regression residual
that is unrelated to the variance of the dependent variable. However, this does not lead to
substantially different conclusions as the ones that were already made above: none of the
leader characteristics exerts a significant impact on the probability of an avoidable loss.
14
Table 1: Estimates from the random-intercepts model of avoidable loss of
vote
FIXED PART:
(1)
(2)
(3)
7.666∗∗∗
(0.141)
7.666∗∗∗
(0.141)
0.009∗∗∗
(0.002)
2.084∗
(1.198)
−0.002
(0.011)
−0.173
(0.182)
−0.860
(0.928)
0.185∗
(0.106)
−0.457∗∗∗
(0.124)
−0.205∗∗
(0.098)
0.009∗∗∗
(0.002)
2.126
(1.310)
−0.001
(0.011)
−0.185
(0.182)
−0.722
(0.933)
0.196∗
(0.107)
−0.436∗∗∗
(0.126)
−0.182∗
(0.100)
−2.663∗∗∗
(0.209)
−4.209∗∗∗
(0.167)
0.129
(1.207)
0.011
(0.022)
−0.089
(0.063)
0.308
(0.650)
−0.208
(0.617)
−0.075
(0.267)
−4.280∗∗∗
(0.187)
0.330∗∗
(0.167)
0.259∗∗∗
(0.084)
3.6e−10
(6.9e−6 )
0.331∗∗∗
(0.101)
0.002
(0.014)
0.308∗∗∗
(0.092)
Vote characteristics:
Closeness of vote
Fraction characteristics:
Number of seats of fraction
Partisan fractionalisation
Ideological fractionalisation
Percentage of MEPs
from national governmental parties
Share of leader’s national fraction
Single European Act
Maastricht Treaty
Amsterdam Treaty
Leader characteristics:
Ideological distance from median MEP
Years in EP
No. of committees and delegations
EP position experience (dummy)
Headed committee (dummy)
Previous government experience (dummy)
Constant
RANDOM PART:
Party groups (Variance)
Party group leaders (Variance)
Log
No.
No.
No.
−11098
6
31
39074
restricted likelihood
of party groups
of party group leaders
of observations
Notes: Standard errors in parentheses.
∗:
p < 0.1,
∗∗ :
15
p < 0.05,
−7200
6
31
39074
∗∗ :
p < 0.01.
−7199
6
31
39074
.8
Figure 1: The probability of an avoidable loss plotted against the age of the
leader
Glinne
Klepsch
Giscard D’Estaing
Predicted probability
.4
.6
Galland
De Vries
Tindemans
Azzolini
Veil
Pasty
Goldsmith
Martens
Langer II
Aglietta
Colajanni
Pasqua
Arndt
Bangemann
Roth
Langer I
Green
Puerta
Poettering
Baron Crespo
Wurtz
Lannoye
Cox
Hautala
Ligabue
Cot
.2
Barbi
40
50
60
70
Age
highly significant, we have to conclude that the leadership theories we have
considered in this paper or at least our operationalisation of these theories
does not capture the extent of leadership influences apparent in our data.
To the extent that we are actually able to measure factors that represent the
current state-of-the-art regarding the characteristics of successful leaders, we
must conclude that there are different mechanisms at work in the European
Parliament than we expect and that leadership has to be modelled as a latent
variable as it is captured by the random intercept at the third level of our
model.
Since the number of leaders examined in this study is rather limited, we
decided to fall back to a simple graphical analysis to give some illustration
of the possible relationship between the success of leadership and leaders’
characteristics. We have thus plotted some characteristics of leaders versus
the predicted probability of the leaders’ failure (i.e. they will loose the vote
because of members of their own fraction who voted against them). The
16
.8
Figure 2: The probability of an avoidable loss plotted against her ideological
distance towards the party group median
Glinne
Tindemans
Klepsch
Azzolini
Giscard D’Estaing
Predicted probability
.4
.6
Veil
Baron Crespo
Galland
Pasty
Martens Goldsmith
Pasqua
Aelvoet
Langer II
De Vries
Arndt
Bangemann
Poettering
Roth
Wurtz
Cox
Hautala
Colajanni
Puerta
Langer I
Green Lannoye
Cot
Ligabue
.2
Barbi
-6
-5
-4
-3
Ideological distance (logged)
-2
-1
calculation of this predicted probability is based on model (2) in table 1 with
the variables at the party group level fixed at their mean and the value of
the closeness of the vote fixed at its empirical maximum. The interpretation
of the graph is thus the performance of a leader under the extreme condition
of maximum observed closeness of the vote. We would label this “leadership
in hard times”: if the probability of a failure under such conditions is low,
we would assume strong leadership skills.
In figure 1 we show a plot of the individual age of a party group leader
versus his chance of failure. Thus, the lower on the y-axis a leader is, the
better his performance. This graph cannot confirm any expectations of the
influence of wisdom accounted by age on the success of the leaders. Rather, it
seems that several quite old party group leaders such as Tindemans, Giscard
d’Estaing and Veil might have been not overly motivated and considered
the EP as the end of their career. Therefore, they have probably not put
enough effort in ensuring party unity. Some quite young party leaders, in
17
particular the Finnish Green party group leader Heidi Hautala and Claudia
Roth from the German Greens or Pauline Green from the Labour Party,
display very low failure probability and thus demonstrate that motivation
and leadership skills do not correlate with age. In the case of Hautala and
Roth, their success was rewarded with successful political careers in their
home governments after their leadership in the EP.
Looking at the graph where the relationship between the ideological distance of the party leaders to their party groups is plotted against the predicted probability of experiencing a failure (figure 2), we can claim that one
might detect a slight tendency towards a positive relation between ideological
distance and the chance of failure. Disregarding outliers such as Tindemans,
the graph indicates that leaders at rather extreme positions relative to the
party median, such as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, might have been impressive
personalities, however, their ideological distance did not facilitate their job
to achieve party unity.
In the following two graphs (figures 3), which depict the duration of a
party leader in the EP and the number of committees and delegations in
which he or she participated before becoming a party leader, it is quite
obvious that the relation is distorted by a pattern of heteroskedasticity. It
seems that at the beginning of a career, success and failure is much more
widely distributed among leaders. There actually are some very successful
beginners such as Giancarlo Ligabue from Forza Italia in the small Party
Group ”Union for Europe” but also some who failed miserably such as Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing. The only party leader in our data set who had served
twice as party group leader—Alexander Langer—demonstrates that a growth
of experience does not necessarily result in lower risk of failure since he
produced actually lower cohesion in his first term than in his second term.
However, in general an increasing number of years as MEP in the EP seems
to help to get an idea about the opinions of the party fellows and to detect
potential conflicts. Thus, leaders with a lot of experience, e.g. Pöttering and
Baron Crespo, usually achieve better voting cohesion in their party groups.
This impression is confirmed by the fourth graph which displays the effect
of committee membership. The more experience a party group leader has
collected in delegations and committees, such as Pat Cox who had served in
seven committees and delegations before becoming party group member, the
better he can deal with possible outsider or extremist opinions in his own
party group. A lack of this knowledge seems to result in very high chances to
failure as in the case of Leo Tindemans. However, some naturals—e.g. Heidi
Hautala—manage to overcome this lack of knowledge maybe due to other
leadership qualities for which we cannot account for at the moment.
The main conclusion from these (two latter) graphs is that growing ex18
.8
Figure 3: The probability of an avoidable loss plotted against the number of
years the leader served in the EP and the number of committees
and delegations a leader had served in
Glinne
Azzolini Klepsch
Giscard D’Estaing
Tindemans
Galland
Predicted probability
.4
.6
Veil
Goldsmith
Martens Aglietta
Colajanni
Pasqua
Pasty
De Vries
Langer II
Roth
Lannoye
Green
Ligabue
Hautala
Bangemann
Puerta
Baron Crespo
Poettering
Wurtz
Cox
Cot
.2
Barbi
5
10
Duration
15
20
.8
0
Glinne
Tindemans
Azzolini
Predicted probability
.4
.6
Galland
Martens
Colajanni
Klepsch
Giscard D’Estaing
Aglietta
Aelvoet
Arndt
Bangemann
Puerta
Roth
Langer I
Lannoye
Langer II
Pasqua Pasty
De Vries
Wurtz
Poettering
Baron Crespo
Green
Cox
Hautala
Ligabue
.2
Barbi
0
2
4
6
19 and delegations
No. committees
8
perience seems to reduce the risk of losing a vote due to defecting group
members and that the variability of this form of success is much higher for
less experienced leaders. We therefore suspect that new party leaders are
much more dependent on either luck or talent than their senior colleagues.
Experienced leaders, on the other hand, seem to have learnt how to actually avoid an avoidable loss of a vote. This might be because they have
learnt about the preferences of their fellow members. However, the actual
mechanisms remain largely in the dark.
7
Conclusion
In this somewhat tentative analysis we have modelled the personality of the
party group leader, i.e. its impact on party group cohesion that cannot be
expected from structural conditions facing the party group alone, as a latent
variable in a mixed-effects model. Employing structural variables that account for effects on party cohesion that prevail at the level of the fraction,
we have shown that the leadership effects we have uncovered cannot be explained by current leadership theories as we have implemented them in this
paper.
Obviously, some of the leaders that performed best have been or actually
are Presidents of the European Parliament. Further, there seems to be some
positive relation between experience and success. It is therefore plausible to
argue that the successful leaders possess distinctive leadership skills and that
they possibly have gained them during their career in the EP.
However, this rises the question whether tenure is a personal characteristic and thus influences leadership, or whether it rather is a result of personal
leadership characteristics. So far, we have not taken into account this potential endogeneity problem explicitly in our model. Doing so, however, would
overtax the aim of this explorative study and should be reserved for future
research.
Moreover, we have certainly missed some potentially critical determinants
of party cohesion, such as coordination mechanisms that may differ between
party groups (Damgaard, 1992; Müller, 2000), and national electoral institutions that may increase or reduce the cross-pressures an individual MEP is
exposed to (Faas, 2003; McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984; Raunio, 2000a; Raunio, 2000b). These factors have to be taken care of in future studies in order
to even more closely approximate the structural ceteris paribus conditions
that are necessary to isolate leadership effects on party cohesion in the European Parliament.
20
21
AELVOET
AGLIETTA
ARNDT
AZZOLINI
BANGEMANN
BARBI
BARON CRESPO
COLAJANNI
COT
COX
GALLAND
GISCARD d’ESTAING
GLINNE
GOLDSMITH
GREEN
HAUTALA
KLEPSCH
LANGER
LANGER II
LANNOYE
LIGABUE
MARTENS
PASQUA
PASTY
POETTERING
PUERTA
ROTH
TINDEMANS
VEIL
WURTZ
de VRIES
Leaders
rank
12
2
16
19
22
11
13
5
9
21
23
26
27
31
14
10
4
1
7
3
25
15
30
28
20
24
8
6
18
29
17
0.913
0.963
0.877
0.871
0.855
0.915
0.904
0.941
0.917
0.860
0.853
0.833
0.766
0.718
0.899
0.915
0.942
0.983
0.922
0.947
0.835
0.899
0.747
0.757
0.865
0.836
0.920
0.927
0.872
0.755
0.876
mean
Agreement Index
0.157
0.117
0.189
0.203
0.200
0.121
0.145
0.170
0.146
0.156
0.198
0.214
0.238
0.249
0.150
0.157
0.105
0.081
0.135
0.139
0.215
0.141
0.263
0.232
0.157
0.206
0.147
0.128
0.194
0.198
0.161
SD
3
11
24
17
1
2
7
13
28
10
30
29
5
31
14
4
9
6
19
20
26
15
27
18
12
16
8
23
25
21
22
rank
0.449
0.410
0.365
0.376
0.467
0.467
0.422
0.397
0.346
0.411
0.320
0.323
0.436
0.281
0.396
0.447
0.412
0.423
0.371
0.370
0.360
0.392
0.351
0.374
0.402
0.387
0.414
0.368
0.363
0.370
0.370
mean
0.293
0.327
0.319
0.284
0.292
0.290
0.287
0.321
0.293
0.268
0.289
0.273
0.307
0.262
0.288
0.301
0.321
0.329
0.310
0.305
0.300
0.287
0.277
0.258
0.281
0.287
0.316
0.312
0.311
0.273
0.284
SD
Agreement Index (weighted)
8
17
26
18
20
11
23
14
19
6
22
25
31
15
21
3
29
10
5
4
1
28
13
9
27
12
2
30
24
7
16
rank
0.036
0.062
0.134
0.062
0.082
0.039
0.098
0.051
0.079
0.035
0.097
0.126
0.273
0.056
0.095
0.029
0.171
0.039
0.033
0.030
0.008
0.145
0.048
0.037
0.140
0.043
0.021
0.204
0.098
0.036
0.058
mean
0.187
0.241
0.341
0.241
0.275
0.195
0.297
0.219
0.270
0.184
0.296
0.333
0.446
0.236
0.293
0.169
0.377
0.194
0.178
0.171
0.091
0.352
0.213
0.189
0.347
0.202
0.145
0.403
0.297
0.185
0.234
SD
Avoidable Losses
(controlled for party group effects)
0.064
0.103
0.078
0.095
0.070
0.026
0.056
0.070
0.045
0.031
0.083
0.106
0.165
0.068
0.054
0.053
0.097
0.066
0.059
0.057
0.026
0.081
0.076
0.061
0.078
0.060
0.042
0.116
0.084
0.051
0.051
mean
0.016
0.016
0.014
0.033
0.013
0.006
0.011
0.016
0.006
0.008
0.029
0.031
0.038
0.017
0.009
0.007
0.034
0.010
0.016
0.009
0.007
0.017
0.017
0.017
0.012
0.013
0.012
0.034
0.027
0.010
0.015
SD
1774
811
1683
501
475
381
1846
671
1954
2587
693
388
579
18
2981
1527
2807
180
305
167
480
3586
967
919
2020
2182
796
1018
1085
1406
2287
N
Avoidable Losses
(controlled for substantial variables)
Table 2: Observed average levels of cohesion by party group leaders in the
European Parliament, 1979-2001
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