Richard Whitaker

National Parties in the European Parliament An Influence in the Committee System?

The European Parliament's increased legislative role in recent years means that its actions are now more likely to have an impact on national parties' policy choices and, indirectly, on their electoral fortunes. This article examines the extent to which national party delegations deal with this by ensuring representativeness among their committee contingents. Using a technique borrowed from Cox and Mc-Cubbins (1993), the article compares the voting behaviour of committee contingents with their national party delegations on the basis of roll-call votes. The analysis shows that, for the most part, national parties ensure higher levels of representativeness on committees that have legislative power. The results support the assertion that, as the European Parliament's actions matter more, national parties have become more concerned with their MEPs' activities.

The European Parliament's (EP) increased legislative role in recent years means that its actions are now more likely to have an impact on national parties' policy choices. Thus it has become increasingly important for national party delegations to act in a consistent manner when making decisions across a range of European Union (EU) policies. This paper looks at a key aspect of ensuring this consistency, the representativeness of national party delegations' committee contingents. The paper tests a model derived from partycentred approaches to legislative organization [START_REF] Kiewiet | The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process[END_REF][START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF] in order to assess the extent to which national party delegations maintain the full range of views among their committee contingents, particularly where those committees have the opportunity to influence legislation or budgetary matters in the EU.

Existing research on political parties and committees in the EP suggests that party group leaderships use their power over committee assignments to reward loyal members and to punish those who frequently rebel [START_REF] Mcelroy | Committees and Party Cohesion in the European Parliament[END_REF]. Such a strategy allows parties to increase cohesion and thereby their control over the legislature itself. Studies of voting behaviour among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are consistent with this and show party group cohesion to be high, particularly among the three groups linked to transnational party organizations: the European People's Party-European Democrats (EPP-ED), the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the European Liberal Democrat and Reform group (ELDR) (Hix et al., forthcoming).

However, a further dimension to party control over committees concerns the representativeness of committee contingents. Distributive theories of legislative organization (e.g. [START_REF] Weingast | The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organized as Markets[END_REF] suggest that committee membership is self-selected, resulting in committees that are dominated by 'high demanders' aiming to improve their re-election prospects by generating constituency-specific benefits; political parties are of little concern in this approach. In contrast, others suggest that parties are key actors in solving the problem of electoral inefficiency [START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF] and in improving legislators' re-election chances in the long run [START_REF] Aldrich | Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America[END_REF]. If parties are to minimize agency losses and ensure consistency in decisionmaking across different policy areas, they need to select committee contingents that represent the full range of views within their party [START_REF] Kiewiet | The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process[END_REF][START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF]. In the context of the EP, although some research has analysed the representativeness of committees in terms of MEPs' occupational experience and links to interest groups [START_REF] Bowler | The Organizing of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-ordination[END_REF], we still know little about the extent to which committees are representative of the range of preferences within each party. Given the lack of public engagement with transnational parties, this concern with representativeness is most likely to be felt by national parties, which, as the EP's influence has risen, are increasingly likely to care about how their MEPs vote [START_REF] Carrubba | National Politics by Other Means?: Voting Behavior in the European Parliament in the Post-Reform Era[END_REF][START_REF] Scully | Conditional Independence: Understanding MEP-National Party Relations[END_REF]. This paper uses roll-call voting data to measure differences in voting behaviour between EP committee members and their respective national party delegations. If there are similarities in voting, we have evidence to support Cox and McCubbins' partycentred theory of legislative organization in which parties employ committees to further their collective interests. Alternatively, the presence of differences in voting behaviour would favour the distributive approach, suggesting that committees are primarily tools for the provision of constituency-specific legislation. This theoretical framework is set out in more detail in the next section of the paper. A second section establishes a series of hypotheses, which are then tested on roll-call data from the EP. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.

Theoretical framework: Committees as instruments of political parties

The question of whether committee members vote in similar ways to the other members of their party is worth investigating because it tells us about the extent to which parties are concerned with their collective reputation and with ensuring that committees act as agents of the full range of interests within the party. However, approaches to understanding parties and committees often assert that their strength is inversely related (e.g. [START_REF] Shaw | Conclusions[END_REF] or that parties are of little consequence for the organization of committee systems. For instance, according to distributive theories of legislative organization (e.g. [START_REF] Shepsle | The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power[END_REF][START_REF] Weingast | The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organized as Markets[END_REF], the purpose of committees is to facilitate the distribution of constituency-specific benefits that increase each legislator's chance of being re-elected. Consequently, legislators will aim to obtain assignments to those committees that reflect the interests of their constituents. Committees may be unrepresentative in terms of the legislature as a whole, because they are likely to be composed of members whose demands in the relevant policy area are higher than those of the median legislator.

Cox, Kiewiet and McCubbins, among others, challenge this orthodoxy by arguing that committees are used by the majority party to coordinate legislators' actions. Under this approach, parties and committees can be strong institutions simultaneously, with the latter acting as an extension of the former [START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF]. Parties will delegate decision-making power to committee members because this promotes policy specialization and an efficient division of labour. In order to reduce agency losses, parties will ensure that committee contingents are representative of the range of preferences within the party group. This allows non-committee members to trust the decisions of party colleagues and helps to ensure consistency in party policy across different issues, thereby increasing the informational value behind the party label (Kiewiet and McCubbins, 1991: 40). Building on this approach, Cox and McCubbins' partisan selection model suggests that the representativeness of committee contingents will vary in line with the uniformity of the externalities resulting from a particular committee's jurisdiction. On committees whose policy decisions have the potential to affect most electoral districts to a similar degree, parties will ensure that committee contingents are representative of the party's views. This will allow for intra-party negotiations such that parties can 'unite . . . behind broad legislation with a national impact, thereby affecting the party's collective reputation with the electorate' (Cox and McCubbins, 1993: 190). Parties are less likely to be concerned with ensuring representativeness among committees whose jurisdictions generate 'targeted externalities', i.e. policies that affect only certain groups of voters. These motivations reflect a concern with the party's reputation among the electorate. Where many voters are likely to feel the effects of a policy, it is important to ensure that all factions within the party are involved in policy-making, such that intra-party disputes can be solved and the full range of electoral interests is taken into account (Cox and McCubbins, 1993: 190-1).

A third approach to legislative organization suggests that the purpose of committees is to furnish the legislature with information about the likely consequences of different policy options [START_REF] Krehbiel | Information and Legislative Organisation[END_REF]. Committees allow legislators to develop specialist knowledge that can be used in the interests of the whole legislature to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the consequences of policies. According to this view, committees will attract members representing the whole range of views present in the chamber (Krehbiel, 1991: 6) such that committee decisions can be trusted by all members of the legislature. Although Krehbiel plays down the role of parties, his approach is not necessarily inconsistent with that of Cox and McCubbins. As Rohde (1994) argues, information may be crucially important in committee composition, but this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that parties do not matter. Indeed national party delegations in the EP can be crucial in providing information to their parties back home [START_REF] Scully | Conditional Independence: Understanding MEP-National Party Relations[END_REF]. If all views within a party are represented, then members can trust the decisions of committees and national parties can avoid outcomes that unfavourably constrain their policy options or create politically embarrassing circumstances in the domestic polity.

The problem with applying these approaches in the case of the EP is that the electoral connection on which these theories rest is weak in the European Union. [START_REF] Carrubba | The Electoral Connection in European Union Politics[END_REF] finds some evidence of an electoral connection in terms of political parties' response to changing preferences on EU issues among electorates. However, this connection operates largely through national political parties. Transnational parties, on the other hand, hardly feature in the minds of voters at EP elections (e.g. [START_REF] Irwin | Second-order or Third-rate? Issues in the Campaign for the Elections for the European Parliament[END_REF][START_REF] Smith | Europe's Elected Parliament[END_REF], hence party leaders need have little concern with the collective reputation of their party groups among the electorate. Nevertheless, there are reasons to suppose that national party delegations aim to take into account the full range of views in party decision-making and to maintain consistency in party policy. Such a strategy benefits MEPs in terms of both re-election and policy goals.

First, national parties are vulnerable to electoral damage at home if their EP members are associated with unpopular policies emerging from the European Union. Witness, for instance, the German government's heavy lobbying of its MEPs on the 'Takeover Directive' in 2001 (Judge and Earnshaw, 2003: 146). Even if EP decisions do not immediately affect public opinion, the actions of MEPs may constrain the policy choices of national parties, thereby frustrating their policy-seeking goals and possibly causing electoral problems in the longer term. If MEPs are to prevent damage to their national parties, and thereby increase their chances of re-selection and possible re-election, they need to make sure that the full range of views within their national party is taken into account in its decision-making. This will be particularly important for committees in areas of policy where the EP can make a difference, such as the Budgets committee and those that deal with legislation under the co-decision and assent procedures.

Second, if MEPs are to pursue their policy goals effectively, they need to build sufficient support to achieve the absolute majorities required by parts of the budgetary and co-decision procedures. Taking into account the full range of views within a party increases the chances of the group then acting together. Furthermore, the ability to make effective use of these legislative procedures contributes to the reputation of the EP as a whole, thus increasing the possibility of further powers being transferred to the EP in the future and allowing MEPs to pursue their policy goals across a wider range of policy areas [START_REF] Kreppel | The European Parliament and Supranational Party System: A Study in Institutional Development[END_REF].

MEPs themselves suggest that cue-taking on the basis of trust in other members of their national party delegation is a significant factor in their decision-making. In the words of an Irish member:

In all honesty, not a lot of the votes that I participate in, and any MEP would have to be honest and say, I haven't a clue what I'm voting for. The reason you trust is because if you're in a group . . . if you're in with similar [sic] minded people, you assume that on issues, even though you're not involved in them, that you're singing from the same hymn sheet, so it's ok to follow them. 1 A British MEP made a similar point:

You're just left to trust your colleagues and if you find one or two of them are completely getting it wrong and you've been led to vote in an embarrassing way that you didn't mean or didn't want, then you say 'hey you're not on the ball '. 2 If these systems of trust work in the EP, then we would expect to see a high degree of representativeness among members of the most legislatively active committees. To the extent that MEPs' actions constrain national parties' policy choices and have potential electoral effects, we would expect to see some evidence of variations in representativeness depending on the uniformity of externalities associated with committee jurisdictions. If, on the other hand, committees are primarily used to satisfy constituency-specific interests, we would expect to see differences in voting between committee contingents and their party groups across the board. The following section sets out a technique for testing these predictions using roll-call votes.

Measuring committee representativeness: Mean absolute difference scores

The mean absolute difference score One of the ways in which the representativeness of committee contingents can be analysed is by examining the voting behaviour of committee members in votes on their own committee's reports or resolutions. Cox and Mc-Cubbins propose a method of assessing this based on the Rice index of voting likeness [START_REF] Rice | Quantitative Methods in Politics[END_REF]. They explain the technique using the example of the Democratic contingent on the Agriculture committee in the US House of Representatives:

First, for each of the twenty-three roll-calls [on bills reported out by the Agriculture committee in the 98th Congress] we compute the difference between the proportion of the contingent voting yes and the proportion of the rest of the party voting yes. Second we take the absolute value of each of these twenty-three differences and average them. This approach yields a straightforward statistic, the mean absolute difference (MAD) . . . If MAD is zero, then the contingent and the rest of the party never differed, and there is no evidence of unrepresentativeness; as MAD grows larger, the contingent appears more and more distinctive in its behavior vis-à-vis the rest of the party. (Cox and McCubbins, 1993: 220) In formal terms the mean absolute difference for a particular party on a given committee is calculated thus:

MAD n c p i i i n 1 = - = !
where c i is the percentage of the party's contingent on a given committee voting 'yes' on the ith vote, p i is the percentage of the rest of the party voting 'yes' on the ith vote and n is the number of votes for that committee/party combination.

Cox and McCubbins' application of this technique to roll-call votes (RCVs) held in the US Congress produces MAD scores ranging from as low as 2.3 for the Veterans' Affairs committee, to 17.9 for Armed Services (1993: 223). In the case of Veterans' Affairs for instance, this score means that, on average, there was a 2.3% difference in the proportion of committee Democrats voting 'yes' when compared with non-committee Democrats on issues reported out by the Veterans' Affairs committee. Although many committees in Cox and McCubbins' analysis show very similar levels of intra-party differences, these two examples are largely consistent with the authors' predictions, in that Veterans' Affairs affects citizens across all districts of the USA whereas the externalities resulting from the Armed Services committee are much more mixed. Nevertheless, Cox and McCubbins conclude that the measure is problematic because it is difficult to assess whether it measures unrepresentativeness or logrolling among committee members (1993: 223). I will return to this issue later.

MAD has also been used to study voting behaviour in the Swiss National Council in the period 1992-4 [START_REF] Lanfranchi | Cohesion of Party Groups and Interparty Conflict in the Swiss Parliament: Roll-Call Voting in the National Council[END_REF]. Switzerland provides an interesting case study because its permanent standing committees were introduced only in 1992. MAD scores may therefore help to show whether the new committees, and the potential for specialization within them, have had any effect on the voting behaviour of parliamentarians. Lanfranchi and Lüthi (1999: 113-16) calculate MAD scores for three different parties and a number of committees in the National Council for the first two years of the standing committees' existence. Their results are very similar to those seen in the US Congress, with MAD scores ranging from 1.6 for the Christian Democratic Foreign Affairs contingent, to 15.9 for the same party's members on the Social Security committee. Therefore, despite the fact that Swiss parliamentary standing committees are relatively young institutions, there are differences in the voting behaviour of their members compared with the rest of their party group. Furthermore, Lanfranchi and Lüthi's analysis uncovered a number of cases of extreme differences between committee contingents and parties, where compromises reached in committee were defended by committee members despite the ensuing conflict with the party group's line (1999: 116).

MAD scores in the European Parliament

In the case of the European Parliament, roll-call votes are not entirely unproblematic as a measure of MEP voting behaviour from which generalizations can be made. RCVs make up only around one-third of all votes taken in the EP (Hix, 2001: 667). According to Rule 134(1) of the EP's Rules of Procedure ( 2004), RCVs may be requested by a political group or at least 32 members and are usually held in order to publicize the position of a particular party group or to allow a group's leadership to monitor the votes of its members (Corbett et al., 2003: 147;Raunio, 1997: 88;Kreppel, 2002: 128-9). [START_REF] Carrubba | Roll-Call Votes and Party Discipline in the European Parliament: Reconsidering MEP Voting Behaviour[END_REF] point out that both of these reasons may mean that RCVs are unrepresentative of voting as a whole in the European Parliament. Concentrating on the second of the two motivations for calling a roll-call vote, they argue that one is unlikely to see instances of low cohesion because party group leaders can use RCVs to discipline members who might otherwise vote against the group line. According to Carrubba and Gabel's model, such leaders will request a roll-call vote only if they can be sure they will win. As the authors explain, 'if either the leader expects to win without having to impose sanctions or the leader expects to lose even with imposing sanctions, she will not request a RCV' (Carrubba and Gabel, 1999: 16). In a preliminary test of their model, using RCVs from the fourth EP term , they find that, in the vast majority of cases, the party group calling for the RCV did indeed win the vote. This suggests that RCVs may overstate the level of cohesion among the EP's party groups.

In a further paper, [START_REF] Carrubba | Selection Bias in the Use of Roll Call Votes to Study Legislative Behaviour[END_REF] demonstrate that RCVs are highly unrepresentative of the universe of votes in the EP. Specifically, rollcalls underrepresent legislative votes and certain policy areas such as the environment and women's rights. With these caveats borne in mind, roll-call votes nevertheless remain a useful source of information. They are still 'the most reliable indicator of party group cohesion' (Raunio, 1997: 117) and, furthermore, they do at least cover a fairly broad range of policy areas and legislative procedures. Nevertheless, any inferences drawn from analysis of RCVs in the EP must be qualified in terms of the unrepresentative nature of votes taken by roll-call.

Notwithstanding these problems, from the theoretical approaches set out earlier we can establish some specific expectations about the representativeness of committee contingents. Cox and McCubbins' partisan selection model would lead us to expect higher levels of representativeness on committees with uniform externalities, and lower levels on those with targeted externalities. Our expectations concerning committees with mixed externalities will vary in terms of the balance between targeted and uniform externalities in their jurisdictions. This approach requires some modification in this context because the EP lacks legislative powers in some areas of EU legislation. Most of the EP's committees now have responsibility for at least some policy areas that are subject to the co-decision procedure. Furthermore, the Budgets and Budgetary Control committees exercise a key role through the EU's budgetary and discharge procedures. However, owing to their jurisdictions, the Constitutional Affairs and Fisheries committees have almost no chance of preparing reports under co-decision and hence are unlikely to have a substantial effect on national politics. In addition, the Petitions committee is not involved in legislative procedures. In what follows, the Constitutional Affairs, Fisheries and Petitions committees have therefore been distinguished from all others, because they did not produce reports subject to the co-decision or annual budgetary procedures in the period covered by the data. 3 Using these modifications to Cox and McCubbins' model, we can hypothesize as follows:

H1: Committees that are legislatively active and that have uniform externalities will be more representative than others. These committees include Budgets, Budgetary Control, Citizens' Freedoms, Economic and Monetary Affairs, Employment and Social Affairs, Environment, Foreign Affairs, Legal Affairs and Women's Rights.

Classifying committees with targeted externalities is a little more difficult. Given that we are concerned with the effects of the EP's actions at the national political level, we need to focus on the extent to which a committee's externalities are targeted within each member state. Agriculture, for example, might affect only particular regions within some member states, but it may be an issue of national importance for other states, such as France; parties from the latter countries will be concerned to ensure representativeness among the relevant committee contingent. Within these restrictions, it still seems reasonable to expect that the Agriculture and Fisheries committees are the most likely to generate targeted externalities, although, to the extent that these vary across member states, the differences in representativeness between committees with uniform and targeted externalities may be reduced.

H2:

Committees with targeted externalities will be less representative than others. These committees include Agriculture and Fisheries. Some committees in the EP generate mixed externalities. The Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism committee (RETT) and the Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy (ITRE) committee are cases in point. RETT deals, on the one hand, with EU-wide policies, such as Trans-European Networks, compensation for air passengers and road safety, and, on the other, with regionally specific issues including the structural funds and the regulation of maritime transport. For the period in question (1999)(2000), however, only a small proportion of RETT's reports dealt with regional policy, because by 1999 decisions regarding the allocation of European Regional Development Fund spending for the period up to 2006 had already been made [START_REF] Allen | Cohesion and the Structural Funds[END_REF][START_REF] Laffan | The Budget[END_REF]. Much of the committee's work has therefore involved transport policy with largely uniform externalities, except for maritime issues.

H3: The Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism committee will demonstrate a higher level of representativeness than will committees with targeted externalities.

Much of the legislation dealt with by ITRE is specific to particular industries and therefore to certain areas within member states. Some reports from this committee concentrate on policies with more uniform effects, such as payment periods in commercial transactions or trans-European telecommunications networks. The range of externalities is therefore mixed but is tilted towards targeted effects.

H4:

The Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy committee will demonstrate a lower level of representativeness than will legislatively active committees with uniform externalities.

Our expectations, however, should be tempered by the restrictions placed on the committee assignment process by the EP's (2004) Rules of Procedure, which state that '[t]he composition of the committees shall, as far as possible, reflect the composition of Parliament' (Rule 152(1)). As [START_REF] Mcelroy | Committees and Party Cohesion in the European Parliament[END_REF] shows, this is largely followed in practice. Within each party group, committee seats are distributed among national delegations, again largely in proportion to their size. Hence national parties may be restricted in their ability to ensure representativeness within committee contingents, simply by the number of MEPs they are able to place on each committee. Thus, even if party leaders are concerned with the effects of committee decisions on their policy choices and electoral fortunes, they may not always be able to ensure representativeness among the relevant groups of committee members.

An alternative hypothesis can be derived from the distributive approach, which suggests that legislators will select committees that allow them to provide benefits of value specifically to their constituency. As a result, committees will not be representative of the entire legislature but will be 'composed of "preference outliers" or those who value the position most highly' (Weingast and Marshall, 1988: 148-9). Weingast and Marshall find evidence to support their hypothesis among committees covering a diverse range of policy areas with varying types of externality. If this is the case in the EP, then we should expect to see unrepresentativeness among national party committee contingents across the board. Note that this approach predicts the same outcome as Cox and McCubbins do for committees with targeted externalities. However, our expectations may again be tempered by the varying legislative powers of EP committees. If the predictions of selfselection in committee membership and high demanders on committees were to hold up, we would surely expect them to do so in the case of legislative committees, where the probabilities of influencing the content of legislation are highest.

H5: National party contingents on legislatively active committees, including Budgets, Budgetary Control, Citizens' Freedoms, Economic and Monetary Affairs, Employment and Social Affairs, Environment, Foreign Affairs, Industry, Legal Affairs and Women's Rights, will be unrepresentative of their delegation as a whole.

Data and results

In order to test these predictions, data were drawn from all RCVs held in the first year of the 1999-2004 term. 4 The Culture, Development and Petitions committees were excluded from the analysis because no roll-call votes were taken on reports derived from these committees in the period covered by the data. The number of votes for each committee varies considerably, from 5 votes for the Foreign Affairs committee up to nearly 200 votes on reports generated by the Environment committee (Table 1). The sample includes votes on own-initiative and other non-legislative reports as well as those taken under the consultation and co-decision procedures, including amendments and final votes.

The sample combines committees frequently involved in the legislative process (e.g. Environment, RETT) with those that have rarely or never had the chance to exercise legislative influence (e.g. Constitutional Affairs, Fisheries). Furthermore, the 14 committees cover all three types of externality: uniform (e.g. Budgets, Legal Affairs, and Economic and Monetary Affairs), mixed (RETT, ITRE) and targeted (Agriculture, Fisheries). In each case, MAD scores were calculated for all national party delegations with a committee contingent larger than 1. Cases where less than half a group's relevant committee contingent were in attendance have been excluded from the analysis. The data set comprises 12 national party delegations covering 5 member states. Table 1 sets out these delegations as well as the committees used in the analysis, together with the total number of RCVs for each. Table 2 reports MAD scores for each committee by party and for each committee overall.

As can be seen from Table 2, the most striking aspect of these scores is that they are comparatively low. Most of the party scores fall within a range of 0-5.5; the extreme values are 10 for the British Conservatives on Foreign Affairs and 0, which occurs for 14 of the party/committee combinations. This suggests that, at least in the case of RCVs, EP committee contingents are for the most part highly representative of their respective national party delegations. 5 The differences in the overall committee MAD scores are not huge but are largely supportive of hypotheses 1-4, reflecting Cox and McCubbins' party-centred approach rather than the distributive explanation of party-committee relations (H5). Thus, the lower scores for Budgets (2.5), Budgetary Control (1.3), Employment (1.3), Foreign Affairs (2.4), Legal Affairs (0.6), RETT (1.6) and Women's Rights (0.5) contrast with the higher MAD values for Agriculture (4.0) and Constitutional Affairs (3.4). The Industry committee has a higher score (2.7) than most of the legislatively active committees with uniform externalities. Notes: The range of delegations varies for each committee because absolute difference scores were not calculated where a delegation contained fewer than 2 members. The number of votes varies between delegations under each committee because absolute difference scores were not calculated where less than half a delegation's committee contingent was in attendance.

a For abbreviations see Table 1. b The MAD score for all votes taken on each committee's reports.

Results for the Fisheries and Environment committees are inconsistent with hypotheses 1 and 2. The low score for the Fisheries committee may reflect the importance of the fishing industry for Spain as a whole. However, without data from other member states it is difficult to test this hypothesis. By contrast, the Environment committee has some of the highest MAD scores for individual parties and the highest score overall at the committee level. The explanation lies partly in the targeted externalities resulting from some of the legislation reported out by the committee. Many of the higher scores are associated with votes on the first reading of the EU's Tobacco Directive. 6 At the time, MEPs, particularly those with tobacco manufacturers in their constituencies, were subject to fairly intensive lobbying from tobacco companies (Judge and Earnshaw, 2003: 276). Indeed, contributions to the plenary debate following the votes suggest that some MEPs were concerned about the possible loss of jobs in cigarette manufacturing owing to the proposed restrictions on exports of stronger cigarettes currently produced in the EU (EP Debates, 14 June 2000). This issue appears to be one of targeted externalities, where the effects of some elements of the legislation would be felt by specific regions within member states. Such a view is confirmed by the fact that voting differences appear to be lower on issues that are more obviously uniform in their externalities, such as air quality or water policy.

Multivariate analysis

We can look more closely at the variation in absolute difference scores using a regression analysis. Rather than using the mean figures, the variable of interest here is the absolute difference score calculated for each national party delegation on each vote. The distribution of this variable is far from normal. Around 75% of cases score 0, and most of the others fall within a range of 1-20. 7 The data are in effect censored below 1 owing to the combination of the small size of the committee contingents, most of which are made up of 2-4 MEPs, and the use of percentages to measure aggregate voting behaviour. Larger committee contingents would allow for more sensitivity in the measure of voting behaviour, thus increasing the likelihood of scores between 0 and 1. Given the censored nature of the data, the appropriate statistical tool is Tobit regression, which splits the data into censored and uncensored values and uses maximum likelihood to estimate the coefficients. For uncensored cases, Tobit maximizes the likelihood of these observations, whereas for censored values it attempts to maximize the probability that the dependent variable is at or below the censored value (Long, 1997: 204-5). Tobit coefficients therefore refer to the effect of the independent variables on a latent dependent variable that is observed only for values above the censored level and, in this case, is censored for values less than or equal to 1.

The equation includes dummy variables for each of the committees in Table 1 except Constitutional Affairs. The latter is chosen as a base category owing to its non-legislative status; hence, according to hypotheses 1-4, national party delegations will be less concerned with ensuring representativeness on this committee compared with those with a legislative role to play. The coefficient for each of these dummies can be interpreted as the effect on the absolute difference score of a vote being based on reports from that committee compared with the Constitutional Affairs committee. Hypotheses 1-3 lead us to expect negative coefficients for the committee dummies and, for Agriculture and Fisheries, coefficients that are higher than others or no different from the base category, because both the Agriculture and Fisheries committees have targeted externalities and Fisheries has no legislative role. Hypothesis 4 predicts that the result for ITRE will be lower than those for the legislatively active committees with uniform externalities (identified in hypothesis 1). Hypothesis 5 leads us to expect higher coefficients for legislative compared with non-legislative committees, reflecting a higher degree of unrepresentativeness on legislative committees. A series of dummy variables was included to control for the effects of national party delegations, with the French Parti Socialiste as the base category. 8 The results, presented in Table 3, provide some support for hypotheses 1-4 but suggest that the key factor explaining variation in representativeness lies in a simpler distinction between legislative and non-legislative committees. Many of the committees defined in hypothesis 1 are likely to reduce absolute difference scores to a greater degree than are the committees with targeted externalities. The Legal Affairs and Budgetary Control committees, in particular, depress absolute difference scores by, respectively, around 17 and 12 points more than does the Agriculture committee when compared with the base category. The differences between these coefficients are statistically significant at the .05 and .1 levels respectively. The estimates for Foreign Affairs, Fisheries and Women's Rights are all of the expected sign and size but are not statistically significant. The results for RETT and ITRE are in line with hypotheses 3 and 4, but the differences between these coefficients and that of the Agriculture committee do not reach conventional levels of statistical significance. Therefore, although the picture painted by the regression results is similar to that predicted by hypotheses 1-4, few of our predictions hold up when we test for significant differences between coefficients. Thus, with the exception of Legal Affairs and Budgetary Control, we cannot infer that representativeness differs on the basis of the type of externality associated with committees.

As with the MAD scores (Table 2), the Environment committee remains an outlier. With party factors taken into account, this committee fails to demonstrate any substantially or statistically significant difference from Constitutional Affairs. This is unsurprising given the targeted externalities resulting from much of the environmental legislation in the sample, as discussed earlier. Results for the Citizens' Freedoms and Economic committees fail to support hypothesis 1. Both committees reduce the absolute difference in voting behaviour between contingents and parties compared with the non-legislative Constitutional Affairs committee, but not by as much as does the Agriculture committee, which has targeted externalities. In the case of Citizens' Freedoms, this may simply reflect a lower priority accorded by parties to this committee compared with others. For instance, despite having access to the vast bulk of committee chairmanships, neither of the largest two party groups in the EP opted to take up the leadership of Citizens' Freedoms during the period covered by the sample (Corbett et al., 2003: 106). For the Economic committee the result is difficult to explain other than by reference to the restrictions on the committee assignment process described earlier. This outcome may nevertheless require further research into the way the Economic committee is perceived by national delegations.

There is, however, a clear pattern in the results, based on the distinction between legislative and non-legislative committees. With the exception of Environment, Women's Rights and Foreign Affairs, the legislatively active committees all have statistically significant coefficients, suggesting that they depress absolute difference scores when compared with the non-legislative Constitutional Affairs committee. This possibility is tested in model 2, which includes a single dummy variable that scores 1 for legislative committees and 0 for others (that is, Constitutional Affairs and Fisheries). The results, presented in the last two columns of Table 3, show that legislative committees reduce absolute difference scores by nearly 6 points compared with their non-legislative counterparts. Although this model is simpler than the one based on the Cox and McCubbins approach, it still supports the argument that, in areas where the EP has legislative power and therefore the potential to restrict the policy choices of national parties, such parties have an incentive to ensure that their committee contingents are representative.

We are left with a problem identified by [START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF]: these figures may be a reflection either of the representativeness of committee contingents, or of the degree of logrolling taking place among committee members. Logrolling is associated with 'high-demanding' members of committees who aim to gain benefits specific to their constituents. [START_REF] Bowler | The Organizing of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-ordination[END_REF] analysis of the interest group links of committee members suggests that the Environment and Agriculture committees are characterized by such high demanders. Therefore, for these committees, the MAD scores may reflect a certain degree of logrolling among committee members. [START_REF] Crombez | Spatial Models of Logrolling in the European Union[END_REF] suggests that stable logrolling may occur in the EU via the member states' choice of Commissioners and their agreement on the Commission's legislative programme. However, EP committees are unlikely to be a key institution in the logrolling process because they lack the gatekeeping power of their US Congressional counterparts. In the US case, the ability to prevent legislation reaching the floor is central to accounts of logrolling and distributional politics [START_REF] Weingast | The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organized as Markets[END_REF]. In the EP, however, committee-floor relations are nested within a complex game of bargaining between the EP, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, which varies depending on the legislative procedure in use and in which the power of initiating legislation, at least for pillar one issues, lies legally with the European Commission [START_REF] Moser | The European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter: What Are the Conditions? A Critique of Tsebelis (1994)[END_REF]. In sum, although there are reasons to suspect that logrolling is taking place in the EU, the data presented here do not allow us to test this. Nonetheless, most of our findings confirm the view that national party delegations consider the potential legislative involvement of committees when deciding on the make-up of their committee contingents. This is consistent with an explanation of committees as providers of information [START_REF] Krehbiel | Information and Legislative Organisation[END_REF], not only to the legislature but, of more importance in the case of the EP, to their parties back home [START_REF] Scully | Conditional Independence: Understanding MEP-National Party Relations[END_REF].

Conclusions

This study has demonstrated that committee members in the EP are largely representative of their national party delegations in their behaviour in rollcall votes. This would suggest that national parties are concerned with reducing agency losses by ensuring that all views are given voice in committee decision-making. This allows non-committee members to trust the decisions of their colleagues in areas where they are not directly involved. Variations in mean absolute difference scores are largely, if not entirely, congruent with a modified form of [START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF] partisan selection model. The restrictions on the committee assignment process in the EP, caused by the need to ensure proportional representation of groups and national delegations, mean that it is difficult for national parties, in practice, to replicate the partisan selection model perfectly. Under multivariate analysis, with the mean scores disaggregated, the pattern of coefficients shows much of the variation that we would expect, but most of these differences fail to meet conventional levels of statistical significance. Nevertheless, the potential for the EP to restrict the policy choices of national parties in areas where it has legislative power evidently influences national delegations' choices. This is demonstrated by the regression results, which show that national delegations maintain higher levels of representativeness on committees that hold legislative powers, compared with others.

These findings support a simple and intuitive view of legislative politics in the EU: as the EP's actions matter more, so national parties are more concerned with what their MEPs do. This argument finds support elsewhere in the academic literature [START_REF] Carrubba | National Politics by Other Means?: Voting Behavior in the European Parliament in the Post-Reform Era[END_REF][START_REF] Scully | Conditional Independence: Understanding MEP-National Party Relations[END_REF]. An implication of this is that, if the EP's legislative role is extended through the European Constitution, then national parties' interest in the Parliament will be likely to grow as more of its committees become increasingly legislatively active. Such changes may spill over into the organization of national parties, such that MEPs become more closely involved in policy-making than has previously been the case [START_REF] Raunio | Losing Independence or Finally Gaining Recognition? Contacts between MEPs and National Parties[END_REF]. As a result, further research will be needed on the links between national parties and MEPs. Indeed, this study has considered only one year in the life of the EP. A more extensive analysis of the importance of legislative powers in explaining variations in committee representativeness would involve looking for changes over time as the EP has gained greater powers. The research presented here might also be furthered by employing other measures of representativeness within parties, such as interest group affiliation and occupational background. Such analysis would add to our understanding of the importance, or otherwise, of political parties in the organization of the European Parliament.

Notes

I am grateful to Simon Hix and to six anonymous referees for constructive comments on this paper. All errors remain those of the author. The roll-call votes used in this article are available from the European Parliament Research Group website (URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/eprg).

1 MEP interview, 21 July 1999. The quotations are taken from a series of semistructured interviews conducted with MEPs at their offices in Brussels and Strasbourg between 1998 and 2001. The interviews cited here were conducted by David Farrell and Richard Whitaker. See [START_REF] Whitaker | Party Control in a Committee-Based Legislature? The Case of the European Parliament[END_REF] for further details of this sample. 2 MEP interview, 21 July 1999. 3 The details of committee jurisdictions can be found in Annex VI of the European Parliament's Rules of Procedure (European Parliament, 2004). See Judge and Earnshaw (2003: 184) or Corbett et al. (2003: 114) for details of the extent of committees' legislative activities. 4 I am grateful to Simon Hix for providing me with these data.

5 It is worth noting that these scores do not measure cohesion within the groups. For example, a party group could be split 50/50 on a particular vote.

If that group's committee contingent was split in exactly the same way, then the MAD score would be 0. Similarly, a group voting unanimously would score 0. 6 The full title of the directive is Directive on the Approximation of Laws, Regulations and Administrative Provisions of Member States Concerning the Manufacture, Presentation and Sale of Tobacco Products (COD 1999/0244). See Judge and Earnshaw (2003: 271-6) for a fuller discussion of this directive. 7 The analysis is based on a total of 799 RCVs. In each case an absolute difference score has been calculated for national delegations with at least two members on the relevant committee and where at least half a committee contingent was present. There are 3343 cases in total. The dependent variable has a mean value of 3.57, a standard deviation of 9.35 and minimum and maximum values of 0 and 81.25 respectively. 8 French UDF cases have been excluded from the multivariate analysis because they had a constant value for the dependent variable.

Table 1

 1 Committees and national party delegations included in the analysis

	Committees	n	National party delegations a n
	Agriculture	18	Germany
	Budgetary Control	51	CDU/CSU	593
	Budgets	39	SPD	534
	Citizens' Freedoms and Rights	68	France
	Constitutional Affairs	147	Parti Socialiste	213
	Economic and Monetary Affairs	130	RPFIE	6
	Employment and Social Affairs	22	UDF	5
	Environment	194	Italy
	Fisheries	25	Democratici di Sinistra	55
	Foreign Affairs	5	Forza Italia	51
	Industry, External Trade, Research and
	Energy	60	Spain
	Legal Affairs	13	Partido Popular	526
	Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism	21	PSOE	315
	Women's Rights and Equal Opportunities	6	UK
			Conservatives	534
			Labour	452
			Liberal Democrats	49

Notes: n = number of roll-call votes. a CDU/CSU = Christlich Demokratische Union/Christlich Soziale Union Deutschlands; PSOE = Partido Socialista Obrero Español; RPFIE = Rassemblement pour la France et l'Indépendence de l'Europe; SPD = Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; UDF = Union pour la Démocratie Française.

Table 2

 2 Mean absolute difference (MAD) scores

	Roll-calls Committee

Table 3 Continued

 3 Dependent variable: absolute difference score. The base categories are Constitutional Affairs for the committee dummies in model 1 and the Parti Socialiste for the national delegations in both models. For abbreviations, see Table1. *** p < .01; ** p < .05; * p < .1

	Model 1	Model 2

European Union Politics 6(1)

Whitaker National Parties in the European Parliament


John Garry

Michael Marsh

Richard Sinnott

'Second-order' versus 'Issue-voting' Effects in EU Referendums Evidence from the Irish Nice Treaty Referendums

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Introduction

Are referendums on EU treaties decided by voters' attitudes to Europe or by their attitudes to their national politics and to the incumbent national government? The political science literature is sharply divided on the matter. Given the raft of upcoming referendums on the EU constitution, the significance of this issue can hardly be overstated. Denmark, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom are due to hold referendums on the new EU constitution in 2005 or 2006. Referendums are also very likely to occur in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and may occur in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia. 1 In one scenario, these referendums will approximate to deliberative processes that will be decided by people's views of the merits of European integration and of the new constitution. In the other scenario, they will be plebiscites on the performance of national governments. In this paper we assess the relative strength of these two rival interpretations of voting in EU referendums: do people vote on the basis of their attitudes to the EU (what we call the 'issue-voting' or 'attitudes' explanation) or on the basis of domestic political concerns (the 'second-order election model' explanation)? We also assess the impact of the salience of the referendum campaign on the relative strength of these two explanations.

We focus on the referendums on the Nice Treaty in the Republic of Ireland. This is a useful case for two reasons. First, Irish citizens were the only ones who were asked what they thought about ratification of the Treaty of Nice. Thus, Ireland is the only case we can draw on relating to the most recent EU treaty. Secondly, there were two referendums on the Nice Treaty in Ireland that yielded two different results. In a referendum in 2001, Irish citizens rejected the treaty, dealing a dramatic blow to the EU's plans. The Nice Treaty could not be implemented unless, and until, all member states ratified it. The Irish government then held a second referendum on the Nice Treaty in 2002 and this time Irish voters endorsed the treaty. 2 We explore the extent to which the move from rejection to endorsement was a function of change in the relative weight of the 'second-order' and 'attitudes' factors. The first Nice Treaty referendum campaign was a classic case of an ineffective campaign, with low levels of citizen interest in, and knowledge of, the treaty. After the shock of defeat in the first Nice referendum, a much more vigorous campaign was mounted at the second referendum, with resultant increases in the salience of the issue and in citizens' levels of information. We can thus investigate the issue we are concerned with -the relative strength of the different interpretations of voting -in two contexts that were more or less identical except for a variable of crucial interest, namely the intensity of campaigning.

We start by describing the two competing explanations of EU referendum voting in more detail. We then specify how the relative merits of these explanations can be assessed in the context of the referendum campaigns on the Nice Treaty in Ireland. After describing the data used in the analysis, we report our results. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings in the context of the impending EU referendums on the new EU constitution.

Conflicting interpretations of EU referendum voting

There are, as noted, two distinct schools of thought on why people vote the way they do in EU referendums. One school focuses on individuals' attitudes, values and beliefs. People support or reject EU treaties, the argument goes, on the basis of their underlying broad attitudes towards the EU project. People who are generally positive towards European integration and the development of the EU will be likely to support an EU treaty and vote 'Yes'. People who are generally sceptical about integration and the EU 'project' will vote 'No'. Of course, a person's general outlook on the EU may take somewhat different forms. Some people may worry about losing political and economic independence; others may be concerned about the possible militarization of Europe; still others may feel that the EU is big enough and should not take in a large number of additional states. Furthermore, views on the role of the government in the economy or one's position on the social liberal-conservative dimension may influence attitudes to the EU. Whatever the particular nature of a person's attitude to the EU, the issue-voting approach suggests that it is primarily voters' views on the development of the EU that drive voting in a referendum on an EU treaty. (For example, on the Nordic countries, see [START_REF] Aardal | Can Ideology Explain the EU Vote?[END_REF] Denmark in particular, see [START_REF] Siune | The Danes and the Maastricht Treaty: The Danish EC Referendum of June 1992[END_REF][START_REF] Siune | The European Union: The Danes Said "No" in 1992 but "Yes" in 1993 -How and Why?[END_REF]Svennson, 1994Svennson, , 2002. . On the Baltic states -testing the hypothesis that authoritarian values lead people to reject membership of the EU in a referendum -see [START_REF] Ehin | Determinants of Public Support for EU Membership: Data from the Baltic Countries[END_REF]. On Norway and Britain -focusing on the relationship between economic left-right positions and support for membership -see [START_REF] Pierce | Referendum Voting Behaviour: The Norwegian and British Referenda on Membership in the European Community[END_REF] Overall, the 'attitudes' approach assumes that views on the EU and/or on the substance of the treaty are the main determinants of voting behaviour in EU referendums.

A different approach to explaining voting behaviour in EU referendums focuses on concerns quite separate from the EU. This explanation is associated with the theory that certain elections are best seen as 'second-order' elections [START_REF] Reif | Nine Second Order National Elections: A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of European Election Results[END_REF][START_REF] Van Der Eijk | What Voters Teach Us about Europe-Wide Elections: What Europe-Wide Elections Teach Us about Voters[END_REF]; for a similar approach, see [START_REF] Anderson | When in Doubt, Use Proxies: Attitudes toward Domestic Politics and Support for the EU[END_REF]. 'Second-order' elections are elections (or, generally, electoral contests) such as local, presidential and European Parliament elections and referendums on EU and other matters that are not perceived by political actors -including voters -to be as important as national or general elections (which are 'first-order' elections). According to the theory, voting behaviour in such second-order electoral contests is heavily influenced by first-order considerations. Following this logic, voters might be expected to use secondorder contests as mechanisms for signalling their support, or lack of support, for their domestic political parties and government. (On the application of the second-order model to EU referendums, see [START_REF] Franklin | Attitudes towards Europe and Referendum Votes: A Response to Siune and Svensson[END_REF][START_REF] Franklin | Uncorking the Bottle: Popular Opposition to European Unification in the Wake of Maastricht[END_REF][START_REF] Franklin | Referendum Outcomes and Trust in Government: Public Support for Europe in the Wake of Maastricht[END_REF][START_REF] Franklin | Learning from the Danish Case: A Comment on Palle Svensson's Critique of the Franklin Thesis[END_REF][START_REF] Svensson | Five Danish Referendums on the European Community and Union: A Critical Assessment of the Franklin Thesis[END_REF][START_REF] Marsh | Testing the Second-Order Election Model after Four European Elections[END_REF][START_REF] Ferrara | Get Your Act Together: Party Performance in European Parliament Elections[END_REF]. Voters who, for whatever reasons, are not satisfied with the performance of the incumbent government may take the opportunity to punish the government by voting against the government's wishes in a 'second-order' election such as an EU referendum. Voters who are satisfied with the performance of the party (or parties) in government may vote in line with the government's wishes (supporting the governing party, or parties, in the local election, voting 'Yes' in an EU referendum, etc.). Thus, an EU referendum may, in fact, be a general election by another name.

A key element of the second-order election theory relates to the notion of salience. Domestic considerations, the argument goes, will be a particularly powerful determinant of voting in situations where the election or referendum is perceived to be very unimportant. The more important the election or referendum in question is seen to be, the lower the role that will be played by domestic political (second-order) effects and the higher the role played by citizens' attitudes towards, or views on, the EU and the substantive content of the treaty in question.

Several authors have also argued that the institutional context affects how strong second-order factors are likely to be. In a development of Schneider and Weitsman's analysis (1996), [START_REF] Hug | Voices of Europe: Citizens, Referendums, and European Integration[END_REF] and [START_REF] Hug | Referendums on European Integration: Do Institutions Matter in the Voter's Decision?[END_REF] distinguish between a referendum that is constitutionally necessary and one that the government chooses to hold. Level of satisfaction with the incumbent government and domestic party political factors are likely to play a weaker role in the former compared with the latter. This is because much more damage can be inflicted on the government in a non-required referendum; losing a referendum that you did not have to hold in the first place makes the government look particularly silly. [START_REF] Hug | Voices of Europe: Citizens, Referendums, and European Integration[END_REF] and [START_REF] Hug | Referendums on European Integration: Do Institutions Matter in the Voter's Decision?[END_REF] also distinguish between a binding and a non-binding referendum. In relation to the former, the result cannot be overturned, whereas the parliament might possibly change the decision of a non-binding referendum. Second-order effects are likely to be stronger in non-binding than in binding referendums. This is because, in a non-binding referendum, voters who wish to punish the incumbent government by voting against the referendum can hope that, if the referendum is rejected, the outcome may then be overturned by the parliament.

On balance, we would characterize both the Irish Nice referendums as necessary and binding (for a discussion of the institutional context and, in particular, of the initiation of referendums in Ireland, see Sinnott, 2002: 811-14). It may seem odd to view the first referendum as binding because it clearly was not so, in the sense that the government did not accept the decision as final and went on to hold a second referendum. However, it was binding in the sense that the only way to overturn the decision was by having another referendum. The first Nice referendum was also constitutionally necessary in the sense that the government almost certainly would have been brought to the High Court and forced to have a referendum if it had tried to argue that the treaty did not have fundamental constitutional implications and thus that a referendum was not necessary. A successful judicial challenge of this sort had forced the government of the day to hold a referendum on the Single European Act and this set a precedent that would apply to any subsequent proposals for significant changes to EU treaties. The second Nice referendum was politically necessary for two further reasons. The first was that Irish political leaders have repeatedly committed themselves to holding referendums on any changes that even approach the magnitude of those contained in the Nice Treaty. Secondly, the government was under severe pressure to hold a second referendum because the result of the first referendum plunged both the accession process and Ireland's relationship with the EU into crisis. If [START_REF] Hug | Referendums on European Integration: Do Institutions Matter in the Voter's Decision?[END_REF] are right, then we would expect second-order effects to be less evident in both the -necessary and binding -Irish Nice treaty referendums. Accordingly, the Irish Nice referendums present a tough test of the second-order election interpretation. However, given what we said above about the change in the salience of the campaign between Nice 1 and Nice 2, second-order effects are likely to be more evident at Nice 1 than at Nice 2.

The 'attitudes' and 'second-order' national election interpretations of voting behaviour in EU referendums are quite distinct from each other. 3 The attitudes approach assumes a rational and reasoned calculation by the voter based on his or her views on EU matters. The second-order approach sees voting in EU referendums as simply a chance for voters to express their domestic political preferences and vote either in line with or against the governing parties' wishes (a vote mainly reflecting their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the government/governing party(ies)). The question of which interpretation is most accurate -or has the greatest predictive power -has important implications for how we interpret the role of referendums and the part that referendums play in EU democracy. As Svensson puts it: do voters 'really address [the] issues and involve themselves actively in the policymaking process on a vital issue or [do] they merely vote for or against the current government? ' (2002: 733). If the latter is the case, then the upcoming referendums on the new EU constitution will be decided by a mishmash of extraneous factors that have little or nothing to do with European integration or with the painstakingly negotiated EU constitution. Likewise and more generally, if the second-order model is correct, we should beware of inferring, in the event of a 'Yes' vote on EU treaty changes, that the electorate was in favour of the substantive content of the treaty in question.

Two hypotheses follow from this discussion.

Hypothesis 1: Relative to second-order effects, issue-voting effects are stronger predictors of voting (Yes/No) in EU referendums.

Hypothesis 2: Relative to low-salience EU referendums, high-salience EU referendums are likely to show stronger issue-voting effects.

The Nice referendums in Ireland

Three issues were particularly relevant in the referendum campaigns on the Nice Treaty in Ireland. First, citizens who were in favour of retaining as much independence and sovereignty in Ireland as possible were likely to have voted against the Nice Treaty. In contrast, citizens who were in favour of sharing (or pooling) sovereignty and decision-making powers with other EU states were likely to have voted 'Yes' (in favour of the referendum). Secondly, citizens who favoured maintaining the Irish position of military 'neutrality' -in the sense of having nothing to do with a militarized EU -were likely to vote 'No' to Nice. People who favoured moves towards a strong European military capability were likely to vote 'Yes'. Third, the expansion of the EU to include a large number of (relatively poor) countries was supported by some citizens and opposed by others. The latter perhaps regarded such an expansion as a threat to Ireland's ability to continue securing large amounts of money from the EU. Ireland, in fact, was likely to become a net contributor to, rather than beneficiary of, the EU. (For more detailed descriptions of how divisions and debates in these areas played out in the Nice 1 and Nice 2 campaigns, see O 'Mahoney, 2001;Hayward, 2002[START_REF] Hayward | The Second Referendum on the Treaty of Nice[END_REF][START_REF] Gilland | Ireland's (First) Referendum on the Treaty of Nice[END_REF][START_REF] Gilland | Ireland at the Polls: Thirty Years of European-Related Referendums, 1972-2002[END_REF] After the shock of defeat in the 2001 referendum, the pro-Nice camp sought to address what they perceived to be the concerns of the citizenry. The governing parties (Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats), the pro-EU opposition parties (Fine Gael and Labour) and the rest of what the anti-Nice camp regards as the pro-EU 'establishment' -including the major trade unions and business organizations -ran a very spirited and vigorous campaign emphasizing the advantages of the European Union. The energetic pro-Nice campaign in 2002 contrasted starkly with the lax and lethargic campaign of the pro-Nice lobby in 2001. [START_REF] O'brennan | Ireland's Return to "Normal" Voting Patterns on EU Issues: The 2002 Nice Treaty Referendum[END_REF], for example, states that a key reason for the success of the 'Yes' side in Nice 2 was their 'much more vigorous and visible campaign'. At Nice 1 their campaign had been 'lacklustre and indifferent' and lacked 'energy, passion, intensity, and, crucially, a visible campaigning presence on the ground in individual constituencies. The No campaign in contrast was charged with conviction, well organized and gained in confidence as the campaign went on.'

One indication of the increased salience of the campaign at the second referendum compared with the first is the fact that citizens found the media to be more useful sources of information in relation to the referendum at Nice 2 than at Nice 1. 4 At Nice 2, 64% of respondents found newspaper articles either very or somewhat useful (compared with 44% at Nice 1), 73% found television news and current affairs programmes very or somewhat useful (compared with 51% at Nice 1), and 68% found radio news and current affairs programmes very or somewhat useful (compared with 46% at Nice 1). There was also a marked increase in the proportion of citizens who found discussion with the family, friends and colleagues very or somewhat useful (64% at Nice 2 compared with 48% at Nice 1). One consequence of the higher-salience campaign at Nice 2 was the increase in citizens' level of knowledge of the treaty and issues relating to the treaty. At Nice 1, 36% of respondents reported that they had either a good understanding of, or understood some of, the issues relating to the Nice Treaty. This figure had risen to 61% by the end of the Nice 2 campaign. 5 Thus, there had been a significant increase in citizens' comprehension of the treaty and issues relating to the treaty between Nice 1 and Nice 2, suggesting that the energetic and vigorous campaign that occurred at Nice 2 was indeed effective.

In the inter-referendum period, the pro-Nice camp sought to increase the importance of the substantive (European) issues relative to the troublesome issues of 'party politics' (aka second-order effects) and military neutrality. Specifically in relation to the issue of neutrality, which was widely felt to have contributed to the rejection of the treaty at Nice 1, the government agreedat the Seville summit in June 2002 -two Declarations with its European partners that were then added to the Nice Treaty. The 'National Declaration' by Ireland states that 'Ireland is not party to any mutual defence commitment' and that 'Ireland is not party to any plans to develop a European army'. The 'Declaration of the European Council' states that 'Ireland's policy of military neutrality is in full conformity with the Treaties, on which the European Union is based, including the Treaty of Nice and that there is no obligation arising from the Treaties which would or could oblige Ireland to depart from that policy'. Further, the government inserted a clause into the proposed constitutional referendum text guaranteeing that Ireland would not join any EU common defence. 6 It is likely that these actions served to deemphasize the importance of the pro-versus anti-military alliance dimension in the run-up to Nice 2.

The pro-Nice camp also sought to de-couple issues relating to domestic party politics from the issue of the referendum. As noted earlier, all Irish parties, apart from the small Sinn Féin and Green parties, advocated a 'Yes' vote in Nice 1 and Nice 2. However, at Nice 2 the main opposition parties (Labour and Fine Gael), in line with the government parties (Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats), emphasized the importance of detaching the referendum issue from the issue of support for the governing parties. This is nicely illustrated by a slogan used by the opposition Labour Party, which sought to persuade voters not to treat Nice 2 as a means of manifesting their opposition to the main government party, Fianna Fáil. The slogan was: 'Hold Your Fire. Fianna Fáil Can Wait. Europe Can't.' Labour thus urged voters to save their anti-Fianna Fáil ammunition for another day. In effect, the pro-Nice parties were implicitly subscribing to the 'second-order election' interpretation; to the extent that their countermeasures were successful, they will have served, in line with hypothesis 2 above, to weaken any potential second-order effects in the case of Nice 2.

Data

The data that we use to test our hypotheses come from two post-referendum nationally representative surveys commissioned by the EU and conducted by EOS Gallup (for an extensive analysis of these two surveys, see [START_REF] Sinnott | Attitudes and Behaviour of the Irish Electorate in the Referendum on the Treaty of Nice[END_REF][START_REF] Sinnott | Attitudes and Behaviour of the Irish Electorate in the Second Referendum on the Treaty of Nice[END_REF]. 7 To tap attitudes to European integration, the 2001 and 2002 surveys asked respondents the following question:

As regards the European Union in general, which of the following comes closest to your views: Ireland should do all it can to unite fully with the European Union OR Ireland should do all it can to protect its independence from the European Union?

Respondents choosing the first statement are labelled 'pro-integrationists', respondents choosing the second statement are labelled 'anti-integrationists', and respondents indicating that they either did not know or could not choose are labelled 'neither pro-nor anti-integrationists'. To tap attitudes to EU enlargement, respondents were asked:

It is envisaged that, over the coming years, there will be further enlargement of the EU. The EU is at present negotiating with 12 candidate countries. Ten of these countries are in eastern and central Europe. The other two are Cyprus and Malta. We are interested in how people feel about further enlargement of the EU and what people see as the possible advantages and disadvantages of such enlargement. First of all, in general terms, are you in favour or against such enlargement of the EU?

Respondents choosing the response option 'in favour' are labelled 'proenlargement', respondents choosing the option 'against' are labelled 'antienlargement', and respondents indicating that they did not know are labelled 'neither pro-nor anti-enlargement'. To tap attitudes to military neutrality, respondents were asked which of the following two statements they agreed with:

Ireland should do everything it can to strengthen its neutrality even if this means being less involved in EU co-operation on foreign and defence policy OR Ireland should be willing to accept limitations on its neutrality so that it can be more fully involved in EU co-operation on foreign and defence policy.

Respondents were asked to place themselves on a nine-point scale (1 = agree fully with the first statement and 9 = agree fully with the second statement). To retain the same metric as the measures of integration and enlargement, we trichotomize responses: 1-4 = 'pro-neutrality'; 6-9 = 'anti-neutrality'; 5 ('no opinion' and 'don't know') = 'neither pro-nor anti-neutrality'.

In order to operationalize 'second-order' effects, the party preferences of respondents were tapped in both surveys and respondents were assigned one or the other of the following labels: supporter of a government party (Fianna Fáil or Progressive Democrats), supporter of a pro-Nice Treaty opposition party (Fine Gael or Labour), supporter of one of the small anti-Nice opposition parties (Sinn Féin or the Green party), or a supporter of either no party or a very minor party (other). Ideally, a question concerning how satisfied each respondent was with the government would also have been asked in both surveys. However, a 'satisfaction' question was asked only at Nice 2 and so we used 'satisfaction' only in our analysis of that particular referendum. (Age, social class and sex were also measured and are used in the analysis as demographic control variables.) 8 The Appendix, which can be found on the EUP homepage, reports the frequencies for our main independent variables.

Results

Table 1 reports the results of three multivariate logistic regressions. Each regression includes issue-voting and second-order variables as predictors of 'Yes' voting in the referendum in question (controlling for demographic effects). Our issue-voting variables relate to attitudes to EU integration, EU enlargement and military neutrality. In columns 1 and 2 of Table 1, secondorder effects are operationalized in terms of whether or not the respondent is a supporter of a governing party or of one of the opposition parties. In column 3 we re-run the analysis for Nice 2 but this time we also include a 'satisfaction with government' variable (which we have only for Nice 2) as part of the operationalization of the second-order model. All three regressions reported in Table 1 show that the issue effect and second-order effect variables are related to voting in the predicted direction. Respondents who are in favour of EU integration tend to vote 'Yes', as do respondents who favour enlargement and respondents who are in favour of limiting military neutrality. Also, those who support parties that are not in government are significantly less likely than respondents who support the governing parties to vote 'Yes'. A similar pattern emerges when the explicit government satisfaction variable is included: respondents who are very dissatisfied with the incumbent government (the reference category) are less likely than those who are either less dissatisfied or those who are satisfied to vote 'Yes'.

Although these findings are interesting in themselves, their real value is that they enable us to test our two fundamental hypotheses regarding the relative impact of second-order factors and issues on how people vote in EU referendums. We can test the relative strength of the two interpretations of voting by assessing how much each approach contributes to an explanation of voting in the referendums. We begin by focusing on Nice 1. We run a model (see top row of Table 2) using only demographics to predict voting behaviour (log likelihood = -339.9). Adding second-order effects to this modeloperationalized in terms of party support -improves the fit of the model by 6.0% (log likelihood declines to -319.7). However, the addition of 'issue effects' to this 'demographics + second-order' model improves the model fit more substantially. The log likelihood declines from -319.7 to -267.6, representing an improvement of fit of 16.3%. 9 When the same series of analyses is conducted for Nice 2 we also find that adding 'issues' to a 'demographics + second-order' model increases the model fit. However, this time the increase in model fit is much larger, 26.2%.

The key importance of issue effects also holds when we use a more comprehensive operationalization of second-order effects (see Table 3). For Nice 2, we run a model in which second-order effects are operationalized in terms of party support and level of satisfaction with the government. As reported in Table 3, this more comprehensive operationalization of secondorder effects has little impact. The model improvement that results from the addition of 'issue effects' to a 'demographics + "comprehensive" second-order model' (99.5, or 23.7%) is still much larger than the model improvement that results from the addition of a comprehensive operationalization of secondorder effects to a 'demographics only' model (64.6, or 13.3%).

These results confirm both our hypotheses. First, in both of the Irish referendums on the Nice treaty, issues are stronger predictors of vote choice than are second-order effects. Secondly, when we compare the predictive strength of --------------------------------------------------- issues across the two referendums, issues turn out to be stronger predictors in the second, more salient referendum.

We now focus our attention on the individual issues -EU integration, EU enlargement and military neutrality -and assess the relative impact of these issues at each referendum. To do this we display again (in Table 4) the information presented in Table 1, but this time we report 'conditional maximum effects' instead of the raw coefficients (which do not lend themselves to easy substantive interpretation). In terms of the impact of issues at Nice 1, the sizes of the effects of the three different subjects were quite similar to each other. Pro-integrationists were 33 percentage points more likely than anti-integrationists to vote 'Yes', pro-enlargement voters were 25 percentage points more likely than anti-enlargement voters to vote 'Yes', and voters who favoured limiting neutrality were 29 percentage points more likely than voters favouring a strengthening of neutrality to vote 'Yes'. However, the relative size of these attitude effects changed quite dramatically between Nice 1 and Nice 2. The impact of attitudes to integration declined slightly and the impact of attitudes to neutrality also declined somewhat, yet the impact of these reductions was more than offset by the rise in importance of attitudes to enlargement. In 2002, pro-enlargement voters were 51 percentage points more likely than anti-enlargement voters to vote 'Yes' (twice the size of the 2001 effect). Similarly, 'centrists' on enlargement were 43 percentage points more likely than anti-enlargement voters to vote 'Yes' in 2002 (compared with 7 percentage points in 2001). Overall, anti-enlargement voters were 50 percentage points less likely than other voters to vote 'Yes' (whereas they had been only 19 percentage points less likely at Nice 1). In the third column of Table 4, we see that a different operationalization of second-order effects -using level of satisfaction with the incumbent government in addition to party support -alters the size of each of the attitude effects only very marginally. Thus, there was a change in the relative strength of second-order and attitude factors between Nice 1 and Nice 2, driven mainly by an increase in Attitude effects

(Anti-integration) (-23) (-20) (-20) Centrist +9 +1 0 Pro-integration +33 +26 +26 (Anti-enlargement) (-19) (-50) (-47) Centrist +7 +43 +42 Pro-enlargement +25 +51 +48 (Strengthen neutrality) (-20) (-15) (-13) Centrist +14 +14 +12 Limit neutrality +29 +15 +14
Note: Table entries indicate that in 2001, for example, Fine Gael/Labour voters were 21 percentage points less likely to vote 'Yes' than were Fianna Fáil (FF) voters, other things being equal. In contrast, FF voters were 25 percentage points more likely to vote 'Yes' than were non-FF voters. Percentages in italics are not significant at the .05 level.

the significance of the issue of EU enlargement. Does this increase in the impact of attitude factors explain why the result of the referendum was different at Nice 2, or do we also need to take into account changes in the distribution of opinions on the individual second-order and attitude factors?

We address this question by running two counterfactual simulations. First, we can look at Nice 1 under the conditions that (the distributions of the variables relating to) party support and attitudes were as they became at Nice 2 but keeping the Nice 1 model estimates of the impact of those conditions. The predicted vote using that model would not have been much different from the actual outcome at Nice 1: 48% 'Yes' instead of 46%. Second, we can look at Nice 2 under the conditions that party support and attitudes were as they were at Nice 1 but keeping the Nice 2 model estimates of the impact of those conditions. The predicted vote is, again, only slightly different: 61% 'Yes' instead of 63%. 10 We can conclude from this that the different referendum result the second time around was not a function of changing marginals -i.e. a change in the distributions on party support and the issue variables. Rather, the result of the referendum changed because of the greater impact of the attitudinal variables. Even so, what was vital here was the changing impact of the different attitude factors, most notably the increase in the strength of the relationship between attitudes to EU enlargement and voting behaviour (and also the somewhat diminished impact of the issue of neutrality).

Discussion and conclusion

Referendums on the issue of the new EU constitution are pending in a substantial number of EU member states. Is voting behaviour in these referendums likely to reflect citizens' thoughts on the future of the EU and on the new constitution, or is it likely simply to reflect citizens' concerns about domestic party politics and their views on incumbent national governments? Our analysis of voting in the Irish Nice referendums suggests that, although the effect of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the incumbent government (i.e. the second-order effect) is detectable, it played a much smaller role in determining the outcome compared with the effect of attitudes to a range of European issues. In short, both Irish referendums on the Nice Treaty were closer to being processes of deliberation on EU issues than to being plebiscites on the incumbent government.

The Irish experience with referendums on the Nice Treaty also suggests that the more vigorous the campaign, the greater the effect of the key substantive issue relating to the referendum -in this case attitudes to EU enlargement -and the less the effect of second-order considerations. This is quite an unusual conclusion in that, in relation to general elections, campaigns are typically viewed as much less important than 'long-term' determinants of voting such as social structure, party identification and ideology. It may be, however, that there is much more scope for a vigorous campaign to have an impact in referendums. All the main Irish parties -the pro-EU governing Fianna Fáil and Progressive Democrats and the pro-EU opposition Labour and Fine Gael parties -were shaken and stirred by the 'No' at Nice 1. Only the small anti-EU Sinn Féin and Green parties were pleased with the result. Rejection of the Nice Treaty in the first referendum was a serious and unexpected blow to the Irish political establishment. Instead of the brief and limp campaign at Nice 1, the main parties, and particularly their civil society allies, delivered a vigorous, spirited and lengthy campaign at Nice 2. Strategically, they sought to 'de-couple' two dangerous issues from the issue overtly at stake in the referendum. First, they sought -through the 'Declarations' and the constitutional provision mentioned above -to convince 'anti-military alliance' voters that the Nice Treaty was not in fact anything to be afraid of. The pro-camp also sought to defuse and neutralize the issue of domestic party politics. Thus they campaigned vigorously to persuade citizens that the treaty was about the future of Europe -and enlargement in particular -and not a referendum on the popularity of the Irish government. The pro-European opposition parties (Labour and Fine Gael) were particularly important in attempting to limit the impact of second-order effects on voting behaviour in the referendum. The fact that satisfaction with the government was significantly lower at Nice 2 than at Nice 1 does not seem to have negatively impacted on the result. Crucially, the effective campaigning of the 'Yes' side made the issue of EU enlargement the key issue in the Nice 2 campaign.

The implications for member state governments facing referendums on the EU constitution can be briefly stated. Government satisfaction levels and support for the domestic political parties are likely to play some role in determining the outcome, but this role is presumably much smaller than the role played by 'issue effects', that is by attitudes to European integration and to issues arising from the new constitution. However, the extent of the impact of such European attitudes on the outcome depends on the vigour and the effectiveness of the referendum campaign.

Notes

1 Referendums are unlikely to be conducted in the Slovak Republic, Hungary or Finland and will almost certainly not be conducted in Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Cyprus, the Czech Republic or Malta. For an overview of the probable incidence of referendums, see URL: http://www. euractiv.com/cgi-bin/cgint.exe?204&OIDN=500751&-tt=fucr. 2 The main effect of the treaty was to make changes in the institutional structures and procedures of the EU with a view to the impending enlargement of its membership. ). We thus weight our survey data so that they are representative of the actual results. 3 What we call the 'issues' and 'second-order' interpretations of voting in EU referendums cover two of the main schools of thought on the topic of voting in EU referendums. [START_REF] Ehin | Determinants of Public Support for EU Membership: Data from the Baltic Countries[END_REF] categorizes existing explanations into a threefold typology: values (or 'attitudes'), 'domestic politics' (or 'second-order' national election effects) and 'utilitarian expectations'. The rational economic actor model ('utilitarian expectations' model) holds that EU integration differentially benefits certain segments of a national population and that individuals who believe they will benefit economically will vote 'Yes' in an EU referendum and people who believe they will not benefit economically will vote 'No' [START_REF] Gabel | Understanding Variation in Public Support for European Integration[END_REF][START_REF] Christopher | Economic Benefits and Support for Membership in the European Union: A Cross-National Analysis[END_REF]Gabel, 1998aGabel, , 1998b)). These studies use class, sex and education as proxies for individual competitiveness, which they hypothesize is related to support for the EU (richer, more educated men are better able to exploit economic opportunities in the liberal EU marketplace and thus support a pro-EU position in referendums). 4 The surveys used are those described in the 'data' section below. The question wording in the surveys was as follows: 'There are many different ways in which people get information in relation to referendums. I have a list here of several possible sources of information. Sinnott, 2003: 8-9). The party preference question was also slightly different in the two surveys. In the Nice 1 survey, respondents were asked which party they would vote for if there was a general election tomorrow, and in Nice 2 respondents were asked to indicate the party that they 'usually support'. The breakdown of responses to both questions is similar at both time points (see online appendix). Note that the wording of the 'satisfaction' question was: 'Overall are you generally satisfied or dissatisfied with the way the government is running the country?' The response options were: very satisfied; quite satisfied; quite dissatisfied; very dissatisfied. Finally, in both surveys, the age of the respondent was assigned to one or the other of five categories, and social class was measured using the usual market research AB, C1, C2, DE and F categories. The gender of the respondent was also categorized. 9 There is much discussion in the literature about the possible direction of the causal relationship between our two sets of independent variables: support for the incumbent government/ governing parties and attitudes to the EU. [START_REF] Anderson | When in Doubt, Use Proxies: Attitudes toward Domestic Politics and Support for the EU[END_REF], Gabel (1998c) and [START_REF] Ray | Reconsidering the Link between Incumbent Support and Pro-EU Opinion[END_REF] argue that attitudes to the EU to some extent mediate the effect of attitudes to the incumbent government; in other words, whether or not you support the incumbent government determines whether you have positive attitudes to the EU, which in turn determines whether you support an EU treaty in a referendum. Thus, in the analysis reported in Tables 2 and3, we include our variables in that order -'second-order' effects first followed by 'issue' effects. (However, when we ran a model regressing EU support on party and demographic variables, we found no significant association between party support and EU support. Also, when we ran a model regressing support for enlargement on party and demographic variables, we found no significant association between party support and enlargement support. Thus, there appear to be no significant endogeneity effects and it does not seem that attitude effects are mediating party support effects. This is in line with the general finding in Irish data that voters tend not to distinguish between the main parties on EU issues.) 10 We do not include the 'government satisfaction' variable in our operationalization of second-order effects in either of the two simulations described in this paragraph. This is because, as noted, the question concerning

Table 2

 2 Contribution of 'second-order' and 'issue-effect' variables to the explanation of voting in the Nice referendums

	Nice 1	Nice 2
	Log likelihood (df)	Log likelihood (df)

Table 3

 3 Contribution of 'second-order' (including government satisfaction) and 'issue-effect' variables to the explanation of voting in the second Nice referendum

	Log likelihood (df)

Table 4

 4 Conditional maximum effects of each variable with remaining dummies at zero and other variables at their mean

		2001	2002(a)	2002(b)
	Second-order effects
	(Fianna Fáil/ Progressive Democrats)	(+25)	(+20)	(+19)
	Fine Gael/Labour	-21	-13	-9
	Sinn Féin/Green Party	-44	-33	-32
	Others	-22	-23	-24
	(Very unsatisfied with govt)			(-18)
	Quite unsatisfied with govt			+18
	Quite/very satisfied with govt			+17

  Please say how useful, if at all, you found each of them in the lead up to the[. . .] referendum on the Nice Treaty [. . .] Using this card, would you say you found each of the sources mentioned very valuable, somewhat valuable, of little or no value or did you not notice or come across the source in question at all?' 5 The wording of the question was: 'By the date of the referendum [state date] how good was your understanding of the issues involved?' The response options were: I had a good understanding of what the Treaty was all about; I understood some of the issues but not all that was involved; I was only vaguely aware of the issues involved; I did not know what the Treaty was about at all. 6 See 'The Nice Treaty: Explaining the Issues -Irish Neutrality and European Security', Irish Institute of European Affairs, URL: http://www.iiea.com/ files/nice/nice8.pdf (pp. 3-4). 7 The surveys were carried out under the framework contract (Flash Eurobarometer) with EOS Gallup Europe on behalf of the Eurobarometer Unit in the Directorate General for Press and Communications of the European Commission. Fieldwork for the 2001 survey was conducted between 20 August and 10 September 2001 among a quota sample of 1245 adults. Fieldwork for the second survey was conducted between 15 November and 9 December 2002 among a quota sample of 1203 adults. For replication purposes, the survey data on which the analysis presented in this paper is based are available at URL: http://www.ucd.ie/issda/dataset-info/nicedata.htm 8 There were some slight differences in the question wordings between the Nice 1 and Nice 2 surveys. Because of the ongoing nature of the enlargement negotiations, it was necessary to change the wording of the question in 2002: 'The European Union is at present finishing negotiations with 10 countries about joining the European Union in 2004. We are interested in how people feel about this enlargement of the EU. In general terms, are you in favour or against this enlargement of the EU?' There is no reason to believe that this shortened introductory wording rendered the results of the enlargement questions in 2001 and 2002 non-comparable. The over-time trends from the 2001 and 2002 surveys are very similar to those found by Eurobarometer 57 and Eurobarometer 58 from a standard enlargement question (see

  'government satisfaction' was asked only in the 2002 survey. However, if we were to include this(2002) variable in our simulation of what the result would have been in 2001 if the conditions of 2002 had pertained at 2001, then almost certainly our simulated/predicted result would have been lower than 48%. This is because contemporary opinion poll data suggest that government satisfaction levels were much lower in 2002 than they had been in 2001: satisfaction with the government dropped from 59% in May 2001 to 33% in October 2002 (see Table A at URL: http://www.tnsmrbi.ie/MSWord/ IRISH%20TIMES%20TNS%20MRBI%20POLL%20POLITICAL%20ISSUES.d oc). Thus, the anti-government side of the Nice debate would have benefited if the (low) satisfaction levels of 2002 had existed in 2001.

Garry, Marsh and Sinnott 'Second-order' versus 'Issue-voting' Effects

European Union Politics 6(2)

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