Former Mep

George Ben Patterson

Gail Mcelroy
email: mcelroy@tcd.ie

Parliament preference outliers

In the early years of the Parliament there was the institutional imperative but now many of these demands have been met. . . . The debate is [now] less institutional and much more about policy content. . . .

Committee Representation in the European Parliament Gail McElroy Trinity College, Dublin

A B S T R A C T

The European Parliament (EP) possesses a highly specialized committee system, operating in a complex institutional and political environment, yet little empirical work has investigated how MEPs are assigned to EP committees and what consequences this process has for representation and policy-making. In this article I examine the growth of EP committees and committee membership since 1979, and address the question of whether these committees are representative of the EP as a whole. Using an original data set of committee membership, national and EP party affiliation, MEP characteristics, and MEP policy preferences derived from roll-call votes, I address three key questions: Does committee membership reflect the party group composition of the EP? Do committee members possess specialized expertise in their committees' policy areas? And, finally, do committee members' general or committee-specific policy preferences differ substantially from those of the overall Parliament? The results suggest very strongly that, although committee members do tend to possess policy-specific expertise, committees are, nonetheless, highly representative of the EP as a whole, in terms of both party and policy representation.

Introduction

Committees form the backbone of most modern legislatures, screening, drafting, amending and even, in some cases, approving legislation. The question of how committee systems form and how parties fill them with members has great importance for the process of policy-making and passing laws [START_REF] Shepsle | The Giant Jigsaw Puzzle: Democratic Committee Assignments in the Modern House[END_REF][START_REF] Mattson | Parliamentary Committees[END_REF][START_REF] Longley | The New Roles of Parliamentary Committees[END_REF]. Parliaments are often large and unwieldy bodies and increasingly function effectively only by delegating important policy-making tasks to specialized committees. Consequently, the subject of how committee specialization occurs and how committee members are chosen has generated a huge volume of academic study [START_REF] Groseclose | Testing Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress[END_REF][START_REF] Krehbiel | Information and Legislative Organisation[END_REF][START_REF] Londregan | Comparing Committee and Floor Preferences[END_REF]. A key question in committee studies is whether committees are representative of the legislatures they serve. Despite the clear advantages that division of labour and gains from specialization bring to an assembly, there are risks involved in this delegation process. Committees may not always act in the interest of the chamber, especially if they consist of unrepresentative samples of legislators. Not only might appointed committees become dominated by partisan interests, but they might also consist of specialists whose policy concerns do not reflect those of the democratically elected legislature.

Previous studies of committee selection have primarily focused on the US Congress [START_REF] Fenno | Congressmen in Committees[END_REF][START_REF] Smith | Committees in Congress[END_REF][START_REF] Weingast | Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Oversight? Regulatory Policy-Making by the Federal Trade Commission[END_REF], although the question has also been recently examined in a number of US state legislatures [START_REF] Overby | Committee Outliers in State Legislatures[END_REF], the German Bundesrat [START_REF] Alter | Minimizing the Risks of Delegation: Multiple Referral in the German Bundesrat[END_REF] and the Brazilian Camara dos Deputados [START_REF] Santos | Parties and Committees in the Coalition Presidential System[END_REF]. In this paper, I examine committee representation in the European Parliament (EP), a legislature whose committee system has steadily grown in diversity and importance over the course of the past three decades. With 732 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) working in 20 official languages, the vast bulk of the work of the EP falls to its system of 20 specialized committees. Most of the activity of MEPs is concentrated in parliamentary committees, not in the debating chamber. As is the case with the United States Congress, the European Parliament in committee is the European Parliament at work.

Despite the important role played by these committees, however, little systematic work has been done investigating their overall composition. In 1995, Bowler and Farrell examined various demographic and background characteristics of the MEPs who occupied committee positions, but they did not look at any specific policy measures of committee composition. Furthermore, their analysis was confined to the pre-Maastricht period, before the Parliament became fully legislative. More recent work by [START_REF] Whitaker | National Parties in the European Parliament: An Influence in the Committee System[END_REF] explored the voting behaviour of 12 committee contingents vis-à-vis their national party delegations, and [START_REF] Kaeding | Rapporteurship Allocation in the European Parliament: Information or Distribution?[END_REF] and [START_REF] Hoyland | Government Opposition and the Allocation of Co-decision Reports in the European Parliament[END_REF] have examined the representative nature of the report allocation process. Nonetheless, a full systematic exploration of the nature and role of EP committees has yet to be undertaken.

In this article I examine three important issues concerning committees in the EP. First, I examine from an empirical standpoint whether EP committees are representative of the party group composition of the EP as a whole. Not only has this question never before been examined in the EP, but it has also seldom been examined in any multi-party context. From a substantive European perspective, this investigation also queries whether the EP has adhered to its Rules of Procedure, which dictate that 'the composition of the committees shall as far as possible reflect the composition of Parliament' (European Parliament, 2004: 177.1). Second, extending the work of [START_REF] Bowler | The Organizing of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-ordination[END_REF], I investigate the characteristics of individual MEPs to determine whether committee members are more likely than other members to have specialized expertise related to their committee assignments. I also include measures of MEP ideology to test whether such specialization necessarily entails ideological bias. If committees are composed of MEPs with specialist knowledge in a given area this might indicate an unrepresentative committee in terms of ideological formation, though equally it could simply indicate the exploitation of policy expertise by parties as an informational asset. Finally, I compare the distribution of policy preferences of committees with that of the EP as a whole, testing whether committees are representative not just numerically but also ideologically. The conventional wisdom among members is that the committees are not ideologically representative of the parent chamber. In this paper I examine the legitimacy of this belief. This involves comparing committee and legislative median positions using Monte Carlo simulations.

The findings suggest that, by and large, the EP committee system is indeed representative of the Parliament as a whole. Not only is partisan balance in committees generally proportional to party group share in the EP, but committee seats are also proportional within countries. This proportionality is maintained despite the fact that committees also tend to be filled by MEPs with specialized knowledge. Despite their relatively specialized knowledge, however, committee members do not tend to be significantly different from the overall legislature in their policy views, either on a general left-right dimension or in their specific policy domains.

The paper proceeds as follows. The next section briefly describes the principal features of the EP committee system, situating it in the context of major existing theories of legislative committee functions. The third section presents some exploratory analysis of committee assignments in terms of party and national representation. The fourth section examines the background characteristics of MEPs who end up on particular committees. The fifth section describes the data and methods for testing the extent of outlying committees and presents the empirical results. Finally, the paper discusses the results and suggests directions for future research.

The committee system of the European Parliament

Committees have played a central role in the EP from the outset. The Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, the antecedent of the modern Parliament, recognized that committees would help alleviate the problems inherent in coordinating work in an assembly that was scheduled to meet in plenary only a handful of times a year. To this end, in January 1953 it created seven committees to conduct Assembly business. But it was in the immediate aftermath of the first direct elections in 1979 that the committee system was significantly expanded and developed as the locus of MEP activity. Figure 1 graphically displays the expansion of the committee system since 1979. At the same time as the membership of the Parliament expanded from 200 to 410 members, the number of standing committees was expanded from 12 to 15. Two further committees were added in 1981 and one more each in 1987, 1992 and 1994. By the start of the sixth parliamentary period (July 2004) a total of 20 standing committees were in place. 2 Most MEPs -562 of the 626 MEPs (90%) in the 1999 session -were full members on only one committee, although some MEPs served on more than one. The average number of committee assignments rose slightly between 1979 and 1994 (Figure 1), and there are signs of another slight increase in the newly enlarged sixth Parliament (full details are provided in Appendix A). 3 An MEP's second committee assignment is almost always on a 'neutral committee'. Neutral committees include Women's Rights, Fisheries and Petitions and tend to be weak, non-legislative committees. They are considered neutral because membership does not come at the cost of a position on another committee.

Figure 1 also demonstrates that the size of committees has increased over the past 25 years. Average committee size has risen from 31 to 43 members, although sizes vary significantly across committees within the same legislative session. For instance, the current (January 2006) Legal Affairs Committee is composed of a mere 25 members whereas the Foreign Affairs Committee has 78 affiliates.

The importance of the committee system is underscored by a recent survey of MEPs. When asked to choose their first preference from among the EP posts of Group President, EP President, National Delegation Leader or Committee Chair, more respondents opted for a committee chair rather than any of the alternatives. 4 MEPs clearly value committee posts and believe that the committee system is a focal point of power that matters to the legislative process within the EP.

Theories of legislative organization suggest that committee systems are formed either to solve coordination problems among representatives by facilitating logrolling among members or to facilitate legislative efficiency (for an overview of this literature, see [START_REF] Kaeding | Rapporteurship Allocation in the European Parliament: Information or Distribution?[END_REF]. The former distributional approach predicts that members deliberately join committees in order to exercise disproportionate influence over the policy areas under the committee's jurisdiction. Committee members share a desire for high levels of benefit from the policies that lie within the jurisdiction of their committee (high demand preference outliers). This results in committees that may be very unrepresentative of the legislature as a whole. The alternative informational approach argues that committees are created to provide a greater number of legislative arenas for policy development and output in legislatures that are overburdened. This efficiency is enhanced by members' specialization in particular policy sub-fields. Informational theorists [START_REF] Gilligan | Organisation of Informative Committees by a Rational Legislature[END_REF][START_REF] Krehbiel | Information and Legislative Organisation[END_REF] dispute the degree of autonomy that the distributional approach ascribes to committees, arguing that most legislation must pass a majority vote on the floor of the house in order to be enacted. It is argued that the incentives for the Parliament are to organize representative committees as reliable sources of information. If this informational view of committees prevails, we should not find committees that are composed of preference outliers or committees that are more homogeneous than the Parliament as a whole (Krehbiel, 1991: 123).

Given what we know about the origins of committees in the EP, the informational approach seems initially more plausible. Legislation in the European Union tends to be a complex, bargained outcome between multiple institutions. The Parliament has traditionally enjoyed fewer legislative powers than the European Council, and any informational advantages developed through committee expertise would clearly improve the bargaining power of the EP. Such specialization was particularly important in the early days of the Parliament when it acted as a mere consultative assembly. Informational advantages brought about by specialization were perhaps the only means by which it could challenge the legislative authority of the European Council. Finally, the lack of 'pork' (selective goods to offer as rewards to constituents) to distribute, coupled with the lack of strong constituency ties in European elections, removes many of the incentives that traditionally are seen to produce distributive gains. Together, these factors would lead us to expect to observe the main empirical implications of the informational approach, namely that committee membership will be highly representative of the legislature and that committee members will not consist of preference outliers.

Partisan representativeness

In order to examine the overall correspondence between party strength and committee representation in the EP, data from the last committee period in the Fifth Parliament 2002-4 are examined. This session was chosen as the most recent full legislative session. 5 The data were compiled from the annual Listes Grises of the European Parliament (full details in Appendix B). The results for the two largest parties, the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the European People's Party (EPP), are presented in Figure 2. The horizontal axis represents the number of actual seats held by these parties on each of the 17 standing committees of the Fifth Parliament, and the vertical axis is the number of seats one would expect if committee seats were allocated according to perfect numerical proportionality.

As is evident from this graphical representation, the proportion of party seats on committees very closely approximates partisan strength in the Parliament. A majority of committees lie within one seat of perfect proportionality (represented by the diagonal line). Only one committee has a PES seat majority or deficit of greater than one seat. The EPP also has a one-seat overrepresentation on only one committee, and it is underrepresented by more than one seat on two other committees. By and large, in terms of partisan representation there is a very close correspondence between the overall makeup of the chamber and the committees. Analysis of the remaining five parties in the EP at this time demonstrates similar results: parties are neither systematically underrepresented nor systematically overrepresented on committees.

Another issue related to proportionality concerns committee representation according to the size of national delegations. The EP Rules of Procedure do not stipulate that committee positions should also be assigned in proportion to national delegation strength. Nonetheless, as Figures 3 and 4 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Actual committee seats demonstrate, national proportionality does indeed seem to be the norm.

Figures 3 and4 represent the actual and expected number of German and UK members on the 17 standing committees for the EPP and PES in January 2002. These two delegations were chosen because they constituted the largest national delegations within both the PES and the EPP in the 2002-4 legislative session.

The results show a strong consistency between a strict proportionality rule and the actual national composition of committees. Again, a large majority of committee assignments lie within one seat of perfect proportionality. Within the EPP, the German members are underrepresented on two committees and overrepresented on two, and the UK members are overrepresented on just one committee. Within the PES, only the German delegation has a deviation from perfect proportionality larger than one seat, and this on only one committee. It would appear that, at least where party and geography are concerned, there is a concerted effort to ensure that the committees are microcosms of the Parliament as a whole. This evidence points to a strong tendency to consider both partisan and national proportionality issues when committee seats are assigned.

Committee specialization

Although the evidence indicates strongly that deliberate efforts are made to ensure that committees are representative of legislative party seat shares, committee members may nonetheless possess expertise or personal interests that are not representative of the legislature as a whole. In other words, committees may consist of specialists in particular policy areas, causing committees to be more homogeneous than the Parliament as a whole. For instance, MEPs with ties to farming, working within the parameters established by the rules and norms of the EP, may be disproportionately assigned to the Agriculture Committee. This possibility in fact reflects a widely held belief among MEPs, expressed succinctly by a former vice-president of the Party of European Socialists:

Committees are definitely and regrettably not representative of the Parliament in plenary, they are not microcosms; this results in legislative distortion. The environmentally minded from all groups are on the Environment committee, giving it a distinctly green outlook; likewise there are too many farmers on Agriculture. The result of this specialization and lack of representativeness is that policy is not reflective of the majority view of the Parliament and we frequently have to spend hours in Parliament voting to correct the committee report and proposed legislation. (Personal interview) Another Labour MEP similarly commented: 'The problem with the EP is that Agriculture is full of farmers, the Environment of greens, Legal Affairs of lawyers, Foreign Affairs of ex-ministers; we need a better balance on committees, not a bunch of specialists.' In this section I examine the evidence for this type of specialized committee membership.

Of course, finding evidence of specialization is not sufficient proof that committees are composed of outliers or high demanders, since such evidence is also consistent with the expectations of informational theories. It may be in the interest of party leaders and the Parliament as a legislative institution to appoint specialists to a committee. Interview evidence also suggests that this is not an inaccurate characterization of the assignment process. One junior member of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform (ELDR) group commented:

I was convinced by the party leadership to take a position on the Industry Committee because of my background. I was really not so inclined myself but they felt it would strengthen the bargaining position of the party as we have only got five members on this particular committee. (Personal interview)

On the other hand, if there is no evidence of specialization, this could indicate that the assignment process is either random or based on different criteria, such as wanting the committee to include members with a broad spectrum of experience, not just those with policy expertise in the field. Specialization may indicate that committees are composed of high demanders, in keeping with a distribution theory of committee systems, but equally it may simply indicate that parties actively and knowingly exploit the policy knowledge of their members for efficiency reasons. Essentially, it is difficult to interpret the full implications of finding or not finding policy experts on a committee.

Using data from the 1999-2004 legislature, I test the hypothesis that there is some degree of specialization in the actual assignment process for the two largest political groups, the European People's Party and the Party of the European Socialists. In contrast to [START_REF] Bowler | The Organizing of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-ordination[END_REF], I analyse the political groups separately. This approach is superior because if the assignment process is largely in proportion to party strength -as demonstrated in the previous section -then statistical evidence of specialization may be attenuated if we include all parties in one equation. For instance, if there are no farmers in the ranks of the PES (as is largely the case) and they have to take the second-largest portion of seats on the Agriculture Committee, the absence of farmers from their ranks would indicate that there is less specialization than might be possible if they had farmers to choose from, whereas the EPP may actually put all its many farmers on this committee. In addition, the assignment process need not necessarily work in the same fashion in each party.

The dependent variable is actual committee assignment at the beginning of the Fifth Parliament (July 1999). In particular, I examine the assignment process to the Legal Affairs Committee, the Environment and Public Health Committee, and the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy (Industry). These three committees vary in their overall influence on policy. The Environment and Industry committees are two of the most powerful in the EP, whereas the Legal Affairs Committee is somewhat less prestigious. If there is specialization, we would expect members with a background in law to be attracted to the Legal Affairs Committee, and MEPs with links to environmental groups or medicine to be particularly attracted to the Environment Committee. Similarly, MEPs with links to big business and industry should be drawn to the Industry Committee. As control variables, I have included measures of the demographic and ideological characteristics policy experience and seniority of MEPs.

Information on the background characteristics of MEPs was culled from a variety of sources, including the Times Guide to the European Parliament (e.g. [START_REF] Morgan | The Times Guide to the European Parliament[END_REF], Handbook of the European People's Party (CD-Group) of the European Parliament (European People's Party, 2001), The Members of the European Parliament 1999[START_REF] Kaeding | Rapporteurship Allocation in the European Parliament: Information or Distribution?[END_REF](European Parliament, 2001) and the personal websites of MEPs.

MEP seniority is operationalized in two ways. The variable Years Served captures the concept of deference to long-serving members of the Parliament, and simply measures the number of years that the MEP has served in the EP. 6 Slightly less than 55% of EPP members were freshmen in 1999, and only 7% of members had served more than 10 years. The comparable statistics for the PES are 43% and 11%. The second measure of seniority is Committee Previously, a dichotomous variable that measures whether the member served on this particular committee in the previous Parliament. Of returning EPP members, for instance, 67% served on the same committee that they had been on in the previous Parliament. The demographic variables include Gender and Age, which is measured in years. The median age for the EPP members was 52 years, and in the PES it was one year lower at 51. Slightly over one-third of PES members were women, compared with just over a quarter of EPP members.

The policy expertise variables vary for the committee under consideration. Legal captures whether the member was a lawyer, judge, law lecturer or former minister of justice at the national level. Almost 20% of EPP MEPs had some connection to the legal profession, compared with 13% of PES members. Industry is coded 1 if the member had ties to industry, was a trade -------------------------- unionist, owned his or her own company or was a former minister of industry at the national level. In the EPP, 14% of members had ties to industry or labour. In the PES, a similar proportion (12%) had ties to industry, largely through trade unions. Green Ties is coded 1 if the member ever had ties to green groups such as Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, or was a former minister of the environment at the national level. There were very few such ties in either party: fewer than 4% in either case. Medical is a dichotomous variable coded 1 if the member is or was in the medical profession or a former minister of health at the national level.

- ------------------------------- Environment & Environment &
The final independent variable, Ideology, measures the MEPs' ideological preferences. This measure is taken from the standard first-dimension W-NOMINATE scores derived by Hix et al. (2005) for members in the Fifth Parliament, the only currently available measure of MEP ideological preferences. These scores measure the MEP left-right placement on a -1.0 to +1.0 scale, estimated from roll-call votes using techniques of multidimensional scaling (a more detailed discussion of the use of the NOMINATE scores is presented in the next section).

Table 1 displays logistic regression estimates of committee membership for the three committees under examination for both main political groups. A positive coefficient for an independent variable implies that changing the value of the independent variable from 0 to 1 increases the probability of obtaining an assignment on this committee (and obviously the reverse for negative coefficients). For example, a positive coefficient on Medical would mean that, holding all other values at their mean, members with a background in medicine are more likely to receive such an assignment.

A quick look at Table 1 confirms that the results are largely consistent with a specialization hypothesis. There are predictable patterns in the selection of MEPs onto committees. MEPs with a medical background or links to environmental groups are more likely to be on the Environment and Public Health Committee. Lawyers end up on the Legal Affairs Committee, just as those with links to industry end up on the Industry Committee. For each of the committees in question, occupational and interest groups ties are in the expected direction and, with the exception of the EPP delegation to the Industry Committee, all are statistically significant. In addition, previous tenure on a committee is highly significant for both parties for all of the three committees. In other words, both expertise and experience matter for the assignment of MEPs to committee positions. These results contrast with those of [START_REF] Bowler | The Organizing of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-ordination[END_REF], indicating here that there is strong evidence in support of a seniority norm operating in the EP. These divergent findings may be a product of the different time period under consideration, since the EP is considerably more professionalized than it was even a decade ago. It may also be a result of methodological choices in the modelling process, since analysing political groups separately makes a difference. Interestingly, for both political parties Gender is significant for the Environment and Public Health Committee: female MEPs are more likely to be assigned to this committee than are their male counterparts. Ideology is not significant for either of the parties for any of the committees under consideration. This result suggests that party representatives on a committee are not ideologically different from their co-partisans. 7 There is thus clear evidence of specialization in the assignment process in the European Parliament. It is not possible to infer from these results, however, whether these patterns reflect a process of self-selection on the part of the members, or whether the party chooses to place policy specialists on the Legal Affairs, Environment and Industry committees. In other words, it is not clear if the assignment process is driven by the collective needs of the party for expertise or by self-selecting homogeneous high demanders. None of this actually speaks to whether or not the median policy preference on a committee is different from that of the floor. The next section directly explores this question by testing whether committees are representative of the full chamber in terms of their distribution of policy preferences.

Policy representativeness

Evidence of specialization cannot prove that a committee's members share a common policy outlook or commitment to high levels of benefits from policies within the jurisdiction of their particular committee. The precise nature of this committee-floor interaction is a topic that has long occupied scholars of Congress, and a voluminous literature is devoted to testing the degree to which committees are outlying in general left-right terms and, to a lesser extent, in their own policy jurisdictions. The work of [START_REF] Weingast | The Industrial Organisation of Congress -or Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organised as Markets[END_REF] and [START_REF] Londregan | Comparing Committee and Floor Preferences[END_REF] have found that the committees of the US Congress are predominantly unrepresentative in nature. However, these results have been hotly contested by [START_REF] Krehbiel | Information and Legislative Organisation[END_REF] and [START_REF] Groseclose | Testing Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress[END_REF], amongst others. In this paper I extend this debate beyond the US case by exploring the floor-committee relationship in the EP. Using original data on committee assignments and members' ideal points, and using a variety of statistical techniques and Monte Carlo simulations, I test the degree to which committees are composed of preference outliers.

To test whether or not committees are composed of preference outliers, we need a measure of MEP preferences. Unfortunately, true preferences are inherently unobservable. Unlike the case of the US Congress, we have no established independent interest group ratings for individual members of the EP. 8 One must therefore use data on MEP behaviour to infer policy preferences. One such means of locating member preferences is to use their voting record in plenary. In this paper I use the W-NOMINATE [START_REF] Poole | Patterns of Congressional Voting[END_REF] procedure to locate members of the European Parliament in multidimensional Euclidean space. The NOMINATE procedure is essentially a scaling algorithm that was developed in the context of the US Congress and has been applied with considerable success in this arena. NOMINATE extracts n-common factors that characterize a multidimensional policy space and provides measures of the explanatory power of these factors. This method of estimation does not take into account either the political affiliation of the legislator or the nature of the vote.

The use of NOMINATE scores is not without problems, especially as not all votes in the European Parliament are subject to roll calls. In the last legislature, for instance, roll calls represented only about one-third of all votes (Hix, 2001: 667). Roll-call votes thus do not provide a complete picture of MEP voting behaviour. The decision to call a roll-call vote may be a strategic action. The political groups in the EP call roll-call votes and there is some suggestion that they may be biased towards the groups that call them [START_REF] Carrubba | Roll Call Votes and Party Discipline in the European Parliament: Reconsidering MEP Voting Behaviour[END_REF]. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to suggest that roll-call votes are called disproportionately on particular policy issues, or by particular political groups or under particular legislative procedures. Thus, in the absence of a better proxy for members' preferences and given that NOMINATE is the standard method used in legislative studies for estimating ideal points of members of assemblies, I will work on the assumption that they are a reasonable, though imperfect, approximation of members' preferences.

The tests applied in this section address the question of whether or not the committees of the European Parliament are composed of preference outliers, examined at four different time points from July 1989 to June 1999. The EP is an institution in the process of defining itself and its powers have increased dramatically since the first direct elections. It is therefore important not to generalize from findings at one point in time to the entire history of the Parliament. It may very well be the case that parties did not care about the question of preference outliers when the Parliament was restricted in its legislative abilities but that the matter may now be a pressing concern. I therefore examine all of the committees separately at each time point, bearing in mind Fenno's (1973: 280) entreaty that 'committees differ from one another'. In the European Parliament there is a stark divide between legislative and non-legislative committees and this may be significant. The chamber may not care much about the representative nature of the non-legislative Fisheries Committee, but it might be deeply concerned about having an Environment Committee that is not a true microcosm of Parliament.

My estimation includes all votes for the two committee periods 1989-92 and 1992-4 and a random sample of 1500 votes for the 1994-6 and 1997-9 committee terms. NOMINATE scores are estimated separately for each of the four committee terms under examination. Following [START_REF] Poole | Patterns of Congressional Voting[END_REF] for each of these legislative periods, I include every legislator who casts at least 25 votes. In addition, I excluded votes where less than 3% of those voting voted against the majority. Using first-dimension NOMINATE scores, I test whether committees are composed of outliers or whether they can be deemed representative of the chamber as a whole. The first dimension explains over 80% of total vote decisions during each time period. The average proportional reduction in error (APRE) for the first dimension is over 60% in each case; adding the second dimension reduces the errors by approximately 10% more. 9 These percentages reflect similar findings in the US Congress. [START_REF] Poole | Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting[END_REF] found that, in the first 100 Congresses, the average two-dimensional classifications were 85% and the average APRE was 0.56 for two dimensions.

Interpretation of the meaning of these dimensions is admittedly subjective. But, for each of the four committee terms, the first dimension very closely approximates the left-right dimension of national politics. Each of the political groups is in correct alignment with classic left-right expectations, with the European United Left and Green groupings on the far left and the Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities on the far right in 1999. This interpretation is consonant with recent analysis conducted by [START_REF] Hix | Legislative Behaviour and Party Competition in the European Parliament: An Application of NOMINATE to the EU[END_REF] and Hix et al. (2005). McElroy and Benoit (forthcoming) offer independent verification that the first dimension of competition in the European Parliament is a classic left-right one through analysis of an expert survey of political group positions.

W-NOMINATE scores are not directly comparable across legislatures, but this is not problematic here because the measures of central tendency in any given committee period are examined only relative to chamber medians and means at each time point. Formal models suggest that studies of committee representativeness should focus on the position of the median legislator when exploring issues of central tendency [START_REF] Black | The Theory of Committees and Elections[END_REF]. Others use the mean as the appropriate test [START_REF] Krehbiel | Information and Legislative Organisation[END_REF]. The latter is more sensitive to outlying observations and thus increases the odds of finding outlying committees. I therefore use both means and medians to test whether or not the committees are outlying, since this analysis represents the first systematic look at this question in the EP and I am interested in finding any evidence to support the hypothesis of unrepresentative committees.

The standard method for testing for difference of means is the basic ttest. However, this method has its drawbacks because it relies on certain distributional assumptions, in particular that the data are normally distributed. To test for difference in medians, one can use a non-parametric method such as a Mann-Whitney test, but the power of this test is relatively low and it makes the additional assumption that the data are symmetric. In order to provide tests for outlying committees without relying on these strong distributional assumptions, I utilize the non-parametric [START_REF] Groseclose | Testing Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress[END_REF] Monte Carlo technique, which makes use of actual distributions to examine to what degree a committee is more outlying than a randomly selected committee would be. Essentially, this method compares the distribution of actual committees with simulated committees drawn from the full chamber. I perform Monte Carlo simulations for each committee for each two-and-a-halfyear committee term.

Using the list of members in each Parliament and their NOMINATE scores, I created 10,000 simulated committees of the precise size of the actual committee under consideration. For instance, to simulate the selection of the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) in 1989, 54 members are selected (without replacement) from the complete list of MEPs and the median and mean scores for this random committee are then calculated. This process is repeated 10,000 times, and the distribution of the means and medians from the randomly selected committees is compared with the mean and median of the actual PAC. From this distribution of 10,000 medians one can examine what percentage of random committees are as outlying as the PAC. Looking at the second column of Table 2, we can see that, of the simulated committees, a proportion of .277 were equally as outlying as the actual PAC, i.e. they had a median score that was equal to or greater than that of the PAC. With a standard threshold of .05 as our test statistic, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the committee is randomly assigned. A similar test is conducted for means. The results are presented in column 3 in Table 2 and we see that .289 random committees had a mean as outlying as that of the PAC.

As can be seen easily from Table 2 and Table 3, the proportion of committees that are as outlying is rarely less than 5%. Looking at simulated medians, we see that in 1989 only the 'neutral' Budgetary Control Committee meets this criterion.

For the remaining three committee periods, the random hypothesis can be rejected only once -for the Social Affairs and Employment Committee in 1997-9. Looking at simulated means, we note that the null is rejected only once over the course of the four committee periods under examination, once again for the Budgetary Control Committee in 1992-4. The empirical evidence is hence overwhelmingly in favour of representative committees. There are -------------------------------------- -------------------------------------- few, if any, systematic differences between committees and the Parliament as a whole in terms of the classic left-right dimension. As a final test, setting the bar even higher for the representative committee hypothesis, I also examined whether the committees are outliers in terms of their own specific policy domains. For example, is the Environment Committee off-centre in terms of 'green' issues? Testing this hypothesis requires policy-specific ratings for each Member of Parliament. To obtain these, I have used a random sample of (for instance) environmental votes to arrive at ideal points for each member on an environmental policy dimension. As is clear from the table, there is little evidence for committees being policy outliers even within their own specific domains. With the exception of the Social Affairs and Employment Committee in 1994, not a single committee is outlying in terms of simulated committee distributions in either of the two time periods examined (1989-92 and 1994-96). The Social Affairs and Employment Committee is outlying in terms only of its mean and not of the standard measure of central tendency, the median. The results weigh quite heavily against the distributional theory expectation that committees should be composed of preference outliers. 10

---------------------------------------- Simulated Simulated

Discussion

In this article I have sought to offer a comparative angle on the committee outlier debate. The analysis found no evidence to suggest that committees in the European Parliament are unrepresentative of their parent chamber. In the vast majority of cases, committee assignments in the EP lead to committees that are largely comparable with the larger legislature. In partisan, national and ideological terms, there does not appear to be any systematic departure from the principle of proportionality in the assignment of committee positions in the European Parliament. This finding holds for both legislative and non-legislative committees and over time. In short, there is simply no evidence to suggest that there is any systematic bias in committee assignments in the EP. Despite conventional wisdom, the Environment Committee is no more left-wing or green than the Assembly taken as a whole.

Evidence for outlying committees is absent; the few cases found could easily have been produced by random error. Indeed, we would expect, in a chamber with 20 committees, to reject the null erroneously at least once (20 * 0.05 = 1). It is not clear if this lack of outliers is the result of a random assignment process or the product of conscious behaviour on the part of party leaders. Nonetheless, the evidence is certainly consistent with a story of party leadership consciously making an effort to create representative committees. These findings are particularly interesting in light of the work of [START_REF] Kaeding | Rapporteurship Allocation in the European Parliament: Information or Distribution?[END_REF] and Hoyland (in this issue), which suggests that the allocation of actual reports within committees is not representative of the chamber as a whole.

The analysis of ideological representativeness has relied on NOMINATE scores estimated from roll-call votes, a procedure that is not free of shortcomings. The selectivity of roll-call votes in the EP, for instance, may mean that these votes do not portray the full spectrum of policy preferences or are called on strategically unrepresentative issues. In addition to the problems of errors in measurement, the use of roll-call votes may bias results towards the null [START_REF] Hall | The Committee Assignment Process and the Conditional Nature of Committee Bias[END_REF]. To validate some of the findings, one possible avenue for future research is to find some alternative measures of off-centredness. Two that suggest themselves use data on amendments in plenary. First, does plenary accept amendments from the reporting committee at the first and second readings? If these are rejected, it would provide some indication that the committee opinion is not representative of the larger assembly. Secondly, how many amendments does the chamber add? For example, does plenary add a disproportionate number of amendments to reports coming from the Environment Committee? This might indicate that the Parliament was not satisfied with the final wording of the Environment report.

This first look at the representativeness of EP committees has left many important questions to be further explored. In particular, the role of political groups in the process of committee assignment needs to be examined in greater detail. Do political leaders consciously choose contingents that result in representative committees, or are representative committees a product of random assignment facilitated by the parliamentary rules and norms? Given the very high transfer rates (upwards of 30%) between committees from one committee term to the next, the question arises of whether this reflects choice on the part of individual MEPs or, rather, an opportunity by party leaders to change the composition of committees.

This analysis represents a first step in examining the committee system of the European Parliament, and there is great scope for future analysis. Noting these caveats, the results presented here suggest that the assignment process in the European Parliament is more consonant with the informational model of politics.

Notes

I thank Robert Elgie, Christian Grose, G. Bingham Powell and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments at various stages of this research. I especially thank Kenneth Benoit for feedback on earlier drafts. In addition, I acknowledge the generosity of Simon Hix, Gérard Roland and Abdul Noury in sharing their roll-call data through the European Parliamentary Research Group and the various Members of the European Parliament who kindly consented to be interviewed for the project.

1 In conversation with the author. 2 This number was temporarily reduced to 17 in the Fifth Parliament (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004) but attempts by the Party of European Socialists to reduce the number of standing committees even further were not successful. There have been calls to expand the number of committees with each enlargement of the Parliament. The creation of subcommittees and temporary committees has somewhat alleviated the pressure for further enlargement of the system. 3 The Appendices to this article are to be found on the EUP webpage. 4 Of the respondents, 37% opted for committee chair as their first preference, compared with 27% opting for what would ostensibly seem to be the most prestigious parliamentary post, the presidency of the Parliament. Only 18% opted for leading their national delegation and 17% opted for leadership of their political group [START_REF] Hix | EPRG Survey of MEPs[END_REF]. 5 This period is not unrepresentative; similar results have been produced for the full period 1992-2004 but are not presented here for reasons of space. They are available from the author upon request. 6 Bowler and Farrell (1995: 240) argue that seniority is irrelevant. Nonetheless, there is evidence from interviews with senior party leaders that seniority is not irrelevant. High-profile committees such as Foreign Affairs and Legal Affairs have a much higher number of returning MEPs than do low-prestige committees such as Culture or Regional Policy. 7 [START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF] offer a third theory of committee composition, which predicts that the majority party controls the assignment of its party members to committees with 'uniform externalities'. However, committees with targeted externalities may be unrepresentative. It is unclear which committees, if any, in the EP have targeted externalities and which have uniform and mixed externalities. Here, all I can say is that the party contingents are representative of their parent party on the committees examined for the PES and EPP. 8 The very first attempts to produce Interest Group scores for the EP took place only in 2004, when Friends of the Earth produced a scale deeming MEPs to be either for or against environment legislation on the basis of a sample of key votes. 9 The APRE is defined as follows:

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1 Committee expansion in the EuropeanParliament, 1979Parliament, -2004. .

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 Committee seat proportionality for the PES and the EPP, 2002.

Figure 3

 3 Figure 3 Committee seats by national delegation: EPP, 2002.

Figure 4

 4 Figure 4 Committee seats by national delegation: PES, 2002.

  APRE =∑ (minority vote -NOMINATE classification errors) ∑ minority vote 10 Standard t-tests and the Mann-Whitney difference of medians test on the data revealed few outlying committees either. The results are available on request from the author.

Table 1

 1 Logistic regression of EPP and PES committee assignments, 1999

	EPP

Table 2

 2 Preference outliers 1989-94 based on NOMINATE scores

	1989-92	1992-4
	-

  Table 4 presents the results of Monte Carlo simulations on these data using the methods outlined in the previous section in five different policy domains: Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection; Economic and Monetary Affairs, Industrial Policy; Agriculture and Rural Development; External Economic Relations; and Social Affairs and Employment.

European Union Politics 7(1)

Committee seats expected under proportionality


Bjorn Hoyland

Allocation of Codecision Reports in the Fifth European Parliament

This article argues that MEPs from national parties represented in the Council of Ministers are more active as rapporteurs on Codecision legislation than MEPs from national parties not represented in the Council. EP rapporteurs can be thought of as informed actors offering non-binding advice to the EP plenary. Expert committees and the Council presidency play a similar role in the Council. Compared with rapporteurs from parties not represented in the Council, EP rapporteurs from parties represented in the Council may incur lower costs in coordinating their proposals with the informed actors in the Council. If this is the case, they should be more interested in writing Codecision reports than are MEPs from parties not represented in the Council. This possibility is investigated using a data set consisting of all Codecision legislation initiated by the Commission between 1999 and 2004.

The workings of the Codecision procedure and the politics inside the EU institutions have been the topic of several studies (see [START_REF] Hörl | Built on Quicksand? A Decade of Procedural Spatial Models on EU Legislative Decision-making[END_REF], for a recent review). In contrast, the effects of the Codecision procedure on politics inside the EP have until recently been studied only in terms of voting behaviour under different majority rules (e.g. [START_REF] Hix | The Party System in the European Parliament: Collusive or Competitive?[END_REF][START_REF] Kreppel | Rules, Ideology and Coalition Formation in the European Parliament[END_REF]. The aim of this article is to investigate whether national party representation in the Council of Ministers influences the number of codecision reports written. The model presented here highlights the different incentive structures faced by a party, depending on whether it is represented in the Council of Ministers or not. Rapporteurs from national parties represented in the Council have lower costs of coordinating their behaviour with actors inside the Council than do rapporteurs from national parties not represented in the Council. This results in higher expected payoffs from writing codecision reports. Although the rights to reports are distributed proportionally, recent research has shown that the allocation of reports is not fully proportional [START_REF] Benedetto | Rapporteurs as Legislative Entrepreneurs: The Dynamics of the Codecision Procedure in Europe's Parliament[END_REF][START_REF] Kaeding | Rapporteurship Allocation in the European Parliament: Information of Distribution?[END_REF][START_REF] Mamadouh | The Committee System: Powers, Appointments and Report Allocation[END_REF]. This paper's contribution to this literature is threefold. First, it offers a theoretical explanation of the allocation of reports in the context of the Amsterdam version of the Codecision procedure. Second, it presents an original data set consisting of all codecision reports initiated by the Commission since the start of 1999 and allocated to a national party during the Fifth EP. Third, it applies a statistical method that allows not only for an estimation of the distribution of codecision reports, but also for an estimation of why some parties do not write codecision reports.

The first section reviews the literature on the role of the European Parliament in the Amsterdam version of the Codecision procedure (Codecision II) and the literature on the internal organization of the Parliament of relevance to the involvement of the EP in the Codecision procedure. The following section presents a model of the Codecision procedure as a signalling game with two senders. The model predicts different levels of involvement as a function of whether actors are represented in both the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament or only in the EP. The third section presents the data set used to test the prediction of the model and the statistical technique. The results are presented in the fourth section. The final section concludes by discussing the implications of the findings and areas for future research.

Codecision and the European Parliament

The literature on the codecision procedure is vast. A complete review is beyond the scope of this paper (see [START_REF] Selck | The European Parliament's Legislative Powers Reconsidered -Assessing the Current State of the Procedural Models Literature[END_REF]. Only the main theoretical and empirical findings related to the workings of the Codecision procedure as amended in the Amsterdam treaty of relevance to the allocation of codecision reports are discussed.

Formal models of the Amsterdam version of the Codecision procedure (Codecision II) highlight the decline of the power of the Commission, and show that the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament have become equal partners. Support from both the Council and the EP is needed in order for new Codecision legislation to be adopted. Furthermore, neither of the institutions has formal agenda-setting power in the last stage of the procedure, the Conciliation Committee [START_REF] Tsebelis | Legislative Politics in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Corbett | Academic Modelling of the Codecision Procedure: A Practitioner's Puzzled Reaction[END_REF][START_REF] Crombez | The Treaty of Amsterdam and the Co-decision Procedure[END_REF][START_REF] Crombez | Understanding the EU Legislative Process[END_REF]. There is not complete consensus on these issues. [START_REF] Burns | Codecision and the European Commission: A Study of Declining Influence?[END_REF] argues that most of the models neglect the role of the Commission. She claims that the Commission is still powerful because it offers opinions on EP amendments in the first and second readings. Second reading amendments not accepted by the Commission need to be adopted by unanimity in the Council rather than by qualified majority (QMV). However, if a qualified majority in the Council accepts the amendments, the EP and the Council will be able to adopt these amendments in the Conciliation Committee. Hence the Commission is able to delay the adaptation of these amendments only to the next stage in the process.

Empirical work on Codecision II finds that the ability of the institutions to agree on legislation at an early stage has increased compared with Codecision I. One of the changes in the Codecision procedure from Maastricht to Amsterdam was to allow the Council of Ministers to adopt legislation at its first reading if the member states accepted the European Parliament's proposal (Article 251). The ability to conclude earlier may also have been enhanced as the actors gained more experience with the procedure or as a new culture of cooperation developed [START_REF] Corbett | The European Parliament at Fifty: A View from the Inside[END_REF][START_REF] Shackleton | The Politics of Codecision[END_REF][START_REF] Shackleton | Codecision since Amsterdam: A Laboratory for Institutional Innovation and Change[END_REF].

Existing overviews of the internal organization of the EP are numerous [START_REF] Corbett | The European Parliament[END_REF][START_REF] Judge | The European Parliament[END_REF]Katz and Wessels, 1999;[START_REF] Westlake | A Modern Guide to the European Parliament[END_REF]. The key findings are that the EP has developed a sophisticated committee system to deal effectively with the voluminous legislative output of the Union [START_REF] Bowler | The Organization of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-ordination[END_REF][START_REF] Kasack | The Legislative Impact of the European Parliament under the Revised Co-Decision Procedure: Environmental, Public Health and Consumer Protection Policies[END_REF][START_REF] Selck | Between Power and Luck: The European Parliament in the EU Legislative Process[END_REF]McElroy, in this issue). The committee system is party based [START_REF] Whitaker | Party Control in a Committee-Based Legislature? The Case of the European Parliament[END_REF][START_REF] Whitaker | National Parties in the European Parliament: An Influence in the Committee System?[END_REF]. The rapporteurs act as agenda-setters inside the EP because they are responsible for drawing up the position of the Committee and presenting the legislative report to the plenary session [START_REF] Tsebelis | Conditional Agenda-Setting and Decision-Making inside the European Parliament[END_REF]. The chair and party group coordinators in the relevant committee negotiate over how the reports should be allocated [START_REF] Wurzel | The Role of the European Parliament: Interview with Ken Collins MEP[END_REF]. This negotiation has been described as 'an elaborated poker-game', in which the coordinators are rewarded with property rights over reports as a function of their party group's size [START_REF] Corbett | The European Parliament[END_REF]. The exact rules of the 'bidding' process might differ across committees, but coordinators may have an incentive to bluff each other into paying more than necessary for a report that they are interested in, by expressing interest in some reports just to increase the price. Although country size and party group size correlate well with the number of committee reports allocated, significant differences in the involvement of MEPs from national parties of similar size can be found [START_REF] Mamadouh | The Committee System: Powers, Appointments and Report Allocation[END_REF]. It has also been shown that those who choose to get involved as rapporteurs have different backgrounds from those who do not get involved. The differences are related both to expertise and to constituency interests [START_REF] Kaeding | Rapporteurship Allocation in the European Parliament: Information of Distribution?[END_REF].

An important motivating factor in the recent focus on the EP committee system has been the increased legislative power of the Parliament. However, potential differences in the incentives to be involved as a rapporteur in the EP have not been linked theoretically to the features of the Codecision procedure. The aim of the next section is to establish a model of how national party delegations play their cards in the report allocation game.

Model

We can think of the Codecision procedure as a signalling game with more than one sender (e.g. McCarty and Meirowitz, forthcoming). Two institutions, r 1 and r 2 , bargain over a policy p ∈ X[0,1] in a one-dimensional policy space ℜ 1 . It is common knowledge that actors in both institutions have policy preferences drawn from a distribution G(•) on X. The responsibility for proposing a new policy is delegated to a sender inside both institutions. Assume two senders, s 1 and s 2 , independently drawn from a distribution of types θ s1 , θ s2 ∈ Θ = [0, 1] with a message space m s1 , m s2 ∈ M = [0, 1]. It is common knowledge that both θ's are drawn from a distribution F(•) on Θ. The preferences of the two senders may differ. If the two senders send the same message to r 1 , then r 1 selects the corresponding p, m s1 , m s2 = p ∈ X = [0, 1]. Actors have quadratic loss functions around their ideal policy. The institutions r 1 and r 2 receive expected payoffs EU i = -(p -x i ) 2 , whereas s 1 and s 2 receive expected payoffs of EU i = -(p -x i ) 2 -c i , where c i is the cost associated with coordinating the message with the other sender. If m s1 , m s2 , r 1 proposes its ideal policy p -si to r 2, ignoring the messages from s 1 and s 2 . With probability q, 0 < q < 1, r 2 accepts p -si , and all actors i ∈ [s 1 , s 2 , r 1 , r 2 ] receive an expected payoff of U i = -δ i (p -si -x i ) 2 . With probability (1 -q), r 2 does not accept; the expected payoffs are then

EU i = -δ i 2 [( ) -x i ] 2 ,
where α + β = 1, but the values are unknown, corresponding to a Nash bargaining solution. We see that the senders pay a cost c i only if they coordinate, because it is cost free for them to send any m without prior coordination with the other sender. The focus in this paper is limited to an evaluation of the senders' incentives to be involved in the process. Two factors are of importance: (a) the cost of coordinating m with the other sender and (b) the resulting policy if coordination takes place. The cost is related not to the policy but to factors related to the sender's type. The willingness to be involved can be rewritten as:

Be involved if: c i Յ (p -x i ) 2 (1)
And:

c i Յ δ i (p -si -x i ) 2 q (2)
And:

c i Յ (1 -q)δ i 2 [( ) -x i ] 2 (3)
We see that a sender chooses to be involved if the cost of being involved is equal to, or lower than, the expected policy payoff resulting from the involvement. The expected policy payoff of being involved will have to be either equal to, or higher than, the expected payoff from not being involved. The fulfilment of these two conditions depends on five factors; the sender's cost, c i ; the sender's policy position, x i ; the sender's discount factor, δ i ; the policy adopted without s i 's involvement times its probability; and the relative power of the two institutions when bargaining with each other in the last stage of the procedure. If the cost increases, the payoff of being involved goes down, holding the other factors constant. The potential policy change resulting from s i 's involvement is positively associated with willingness to be involved. Hence, as the stakes of the issues go up, senders with higher costs are willing to participate. The higher parties' discount payoffs (1 -δ) in the future compared with payoffs today, the more willing they are to be involved. As the difference increases between the policy adopted with s i 's involvement and the policy adopted without s i 's involvement, the willingness to be involved increases. The bargaining power of the institutions whose collective preference is located furthest away from those of sender s i is positively associated with willingness to be involved in the process. This is the same for both senders. The conditions for both senders sending informative signals, the same m, are that conditions (1), ( 2) and (3) hold for both senders simultaneously and that r 1 prefers m s1 = m s2 = p to any pЈ m s1 , = m s2 . The condition for this is

α β p p r r 1 2 2 + α β p p r r 1 2 2 + U r1 (p) Ն δ(pЈ -x r1 )q Ն δ 2 (1 -q)( ) ∀pЈ.
Hence there may exist an informative equilibrium if δ is sufficiently low that s 1, s 2 and r 1 prefer p to the discounted value of any other pЈ that may materialize from continuing the game. The sufficient δ is decreasing as

∑ i∈s1,s2,r1 (p -x i ) → ϱ.
As the differences of the policy preferences of the actors involved increase, future payoffs have to be discounted more heavily in order for an informative equilibrium to exist. In other words, the closer the policy preferences of the involved actors, the more likely it is that an informative equilibrium will exist.

The right to draw up a proposal for a piece of legislation in the relevant committee and in the plenary session of the Parliament is allocated to an individual MEP, called the rapporteur. The right to be involved as a rapporteur is a function of the size of the party group and the national party. We can combine the rights to be involved, k, and the cost of being involved, c, to find the marginal rate of substitution between the frequency of involvement and costs. Let the frequency be defined by L i = (k i -c i )/c i . Parties with higher costs of coordinating their message will hence write fewer reports. 1 H1: Parties with lower costs of coordinating their message with the sender from the Council will be more frequently involved as EP rapporteurs than parties with higher coordination costs.

Data

The dependent variable is the number of codecision reports written by a national party in a given year. The data set consists of all codecision reports initiated by the Commission between 1999 and 2003, i.e. labelled COD1999/xx/xx or later. 2 Legislation initiated earlier but considered during this period is excluded, as is legislation where more than one MEP acts as rapporteur (co-rapporteurships) or legislation on which no MEP acts as rapporteur. Reports allocated to MEPs from Luxembourg are excluded owing to missing data on some of the independent variables. This gives a total of 372 Codecision reports. Once Luxembourg is excluded, there were 106 national parties present in the EP during the period under study. The total number of observations is 529; 360 of these observations take the value 0, and 169 take positive values. The maximum number of reports allocated to a national party in any one year is 11; the mean is 0.704. Because the phenomenon of interest is the number of reports allocated to party i in a given year, the dependent variable is best described as a count outcome. It cannot take

α β p p r r 1 2 2 +
negative values, and its measurement is discrete. Hence, a count model seems more appropriate than a standard ordinary least squares model. The standard count model is the Poisson regression model, which assumes that the conditional variance is equal to the conditional mean. If the conditional variance is greater than the conditional mean, the Poisson regression model will be consistent but inefficient, with standard errors biased downwards. This might result in rejection of the null hypothesis in cases where it should not be rejected. The negative binomial regression model allows for the conditional variance to exceed the conditional mean, by estimating the conditional mean as a random variable consisting of the independent variables and a random disturbance term. The random disturbance term has the effect of allowing for variance on the dependent variable for observations with the same values on the independent variables. This is owing to unobserved heterogeneity in the data, captured by the random disturbance term. It may, however, be the case that the reasons for not writing codecision reports are different from the factors that influence the number of codecision reports a party writes. For example, the reasons for most Eurosceptic parties not writing codecision reports might be very different from the reasons for Dutch MEPs being overrepresented [START_REF] Mamadouh | The Committee System: Powers, Appointments and Report Allocation[END_REF]. To take account of this possibility, the process that generates zero counts may be modelled separately, as a binary logistic model. Combining the additional zero outcome process with the negative binomial model from above gives the zero-inflated negative binomial model. This model produces separate estimates for the non-zero and zero outcomes (Long, 1997: 217-50). The coefficients for the count outcome are labelled B, and the binary zero-count coefficients are labelled Y.

The independent variables of interest for the theory are government, policy and partysize. Government is a dichotomous variable taking the value 1 if the party was a member of the national government at the start of the year, 0 otherwise. Table 1 provides an overview of the governing parties in the member states. Policy captures the effect of policy location. I use NOMINATE scores on the first dimension from the first half of the 1999-2004 EP (see [START_REF] Hix | Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979-2001[END_REF]. This dimension can be understood as a version of the normal left-right policy dimension [START_REF] Hix | Legislative Behaviour and Party Competition in the EU: An Application of Nominate in the Post 1999 European Parliament[END_REF](Hix, , 2002b)). Higher values indicate locations further to the right in the policy space. Partysize is the number of representatives in the national party delegation to the European Parliament.

To control for the effects of parties' attitude towards Europe on their uptake of reports, data from an expert survey are used (Marks and Steenbergen, 2004). The data set contains four variables relevant for this study: dissent, position, salience and EP. Dissent is a measure of internal dissent in the party over European integration. The scale goes from 1 to 5, where 1 represents complete unity and 5 would suggest that the majority of party activists oppose the position of the leadership. Position captures the attitude of the party towards European integration. A high score indicates a favourable position; a low score indicates Euroscepticism. The existing literature would suggest that the relationship should be positive: parties more favourable towards European integration should also be more interested in taking on committee work. Salience measures how important European integration is for the party. The scale goes from 1 to 7, where 1 means that the party does not think that European integration is important and 7 would mean that European integration is the most important issue for the party. From the existing literature it might be expected that the effect is positive: the more importance a party attaches to European integration, the more committee work the party is willing to undertake. EP is a measure of party leadership positions on the power of the European Parliament. The scale goes from 1 to 7, where 1 means that the party is against expanding the powers of the EP, and 7 indicates that the party favours strengthening the EP.

Results

This section first presents some descriptive statistics before moving on to analyse the results from the regression models. Table 2 shows the conditional mean number of codecision reports per year and standard deviations in the different party groups, conditional on being represented in the Council. We see that the overall mean number of reports per year in the two groups is 0.58 and 0.98 for opposition and governing parties, respectively. There are differences within the different party groups as well. Christian Democratic parties (EPP) that hold national cabinet posts write on average 1.55 codecision reports, whereas their colleagues out of office write only 1.11 on average. There is a similar pattern for socialist (PES) governing and opposition parties.

Those represented in the Council write on average 1.33 codecision reports, whereas those that are not represented write on average 0.99. The pattern that national parties represented in the Council write more codecision reports is consistent across all party groups, but the difference between the two subgroups varies across party groups. The descriptive data show substantial variation within each subgroup.

The fact that the conditional variance is greater than the conditional mean suggests that a binomial model is more suitable than a standard Poisson model for analysing the data. I consider two specifications (see Table 3). Model 1 contains only the variables related to the hypothesis: whether the party is represented in the Council; its location in the policy space; and the size of the party delegation measured by the number of MEPs. Model 2 includes control variables. Because the effect of location in the policy space might differ between those national parties represented in the Council and those that are not represented, I also introduce an interaction effect between government and policy, labelled interaction.

The Vuong test indicates that a zero-inflated negative binomial model is favoured over the negative binomial model (see Long, 1997: 248). The likelihood χ 2 tests for both models are highly significant (χ 2 = 130.09, p-value ≈ .000 for the reduced model, and χ 2 = 176.92, p-value ≈ .000 for the full model). Hence, both of them explain some of the variation in the data. Comparing the log-likelihoods of the two models gives a likelihood χ 2 ratio of 62.59, which is highly significant. Thus, the hypothesis that the full model does not offer additional explanatory power is rejected. Testing the different groups of explanatory parameters, we have to reject the hypothesis that the variables measuring the effect of party group (χ 2 = 8.58, p-value = .036), institutional considerations (χ 2 = 25.79, p-value = .001) or representation in the Council and location in the policy space (χ 2 = 12.81, p-value = .001) 3 are jointly zero.

Governing parties

Opposition parties - -------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ Discussing the effect of individual variables, we see that the government variable is significant and in the expected direction: being in government increases the predicted production of codecision reports. Becoming represented in the Council of Ministers is associated with an increase in the expected number of reports by 43%, controlling for party size and location in the policy space (see Table 4). The variable measuring location in the policy space is significant and positive, suggesting that parties located further to the right are more frequently involved than parties on the left as codecision rapporteurs. During the period under investigation, most governing parties were located in the centre to left-hand side of the policy spectrum. However, because the Council uses qualified majority voting for most policy areas covered by the codecision procedure, the findings seem to suggest that those parties closest to the pivot in the Council were more interested than those further away in being involved. A one standard unit change toward the right in the policy space is associated with an increase in the expected number of codecision reports by 30%.

- B-coefficient Z-score Y-coefficient Z-score B-coefficient Z-score Y-coefficient Z-
Party size is also significant and positively associated with the number of reports. For each additional MEP, the increase in the number of codecision reports is in the region of 7%.

The model suggests that parties located further to the right are also more likely not to write any codecision reports at all. One standard deviation change to the right is associated with an increase in the odds of not writing codecision reports in any given year by a factor of 2.79. Party size is also significant. A one member increase in the size of the national party delegation to the EP makes it 44% less likely that a party will not be allocated any codecision reports in any given year.

We now move on to the full model. Representation in the Council has a positive and significant effect on the number of codecision reports a party writes. The expected number of reports is 36% higher for governing parties compared with opposition parties, holding all other variables constant. This is very similar to the effect in the reduced model. Location in the policy space is significant and positive. A one standard unit change to the right in the policy space is associated with a 57% increase in the number of reports. From the interaction term we see that the effect of location in the policy space is stronger for governing than for opposition parties. Being represented in the Council increases the effect of a standard deviation rightward change in the policy location by 48% compared with a standard deviation rightward change amongst opposition parties. The effect of location in the policy space seems to get stronger when other factors are controlled for. The effect of party size is positive and highly significant. An additional MEP is associated with a 5% increase in the number of reports, holding all other variables constant. This is similar to the effect found in the reduced model. Overall, the variables in the reduced model seem to be resistant to the introduction of the control variables.

The effect of party position on European integration is significant and negative, suggesting that a pro-integrationist stand is associated with fewer, not more, codecision reports. A standard deviation increase in support for European integration decreases the expected number of codecision reports by 46%. Salience of European integration does not seem to have an independent statistical significant effect on the number of codecision reports. Party dissent over integration has a positive, and significant, effect on the number of reports. A standard deviation increase in party dissent is associated with a 22% increase in the number of codecision reports. Institutional preference for a stronger European Parliament has a positive, and highly significant, effect on the number of reports. A one standard deviation increase more than doubles the expected number codecision reports (by a factor of 2.45). Amongst the party groups, only membership in the PES has a significant impact on the number of codecision reports. The effect is positive: national parties affiliated with the PES have an expected number of codecision reports that is 56% higher than that for parties from the smaller party groups. The effect is significant when compared with the EPP (χ 2 = 6.07, p-value = .013) and the ELDR (χ 2 = 6.01, p-value = .014) but not when compared with the Greens (χ 2 = 2.55, p-value = .11).

The factors associated with failure to write any codecision report are only partly the same as the factors associated with the number of reports parties write. As we also found in model 1, whether a party is represented in the Council or not does not seem to have any influence on the probability of not writing codecision reports. Again, as in model 1, location in the policy space is significant and positive, indicating that parties on the right are more likely than parties on the left not to be involved as rapporteurs in the codecision process. A standard deviation change to the right is associated with a 51 times increase in the likelihood of not writing reports. The effect of a standard deviation move to the right for governing parties is even larger, increasing the effect of such a change from a 51 times increase to a 67 times increase in the likelihood of not writing any reports. The effect of a rightward change in the location in the policy space is hence twofold. Such a shift is, on the one hand, associated with an increase in the number of reports, if the party is likely to be in the subset of parties that are allocated codecision reports. Such a shift is, on the other hand, also associated with an increase in the likelihood of being amongst those parties that never write any codecision reports at all.

The size of the national party delegation has a significant effect on the likelihood of being amongst the parties that do not write any codecision reports. The direction is negative, as expected. The fewer the MEPs, the more likely it is that the party does not get to write any of these reports. The effect of a one member decrease in the size of the delegation is a 78% increase in the likelihood of being in the group of parties that do not get a chance to write codecision reports. Compared with model 1, we see that the effect of one additional MEP is even larger once other factors have been controlled for. It is also interesting to note that the effect of a one member change in the size of the national party delegation has a much larger effect on the likelihood of not writing any codecision reports at all compared with the effect it has on the number of codecision reports.

Table 5 compares the predicted probabilities of being allocated 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 or more codecision reports annually for governing and opposition parties. The first two columns give the predicted probabilities of the different numbers of reports, holding all other variables constant at their mean. Columns 3 and 4 show the difference between governing and opposition parties within the PES, and columns 5 and 6 show the difference between governing and opposition parties within the EPP. Overall, we see that governing parties have a higher predicted number of codecision reports and a lower level of not writing any reports in a particular year, given that it is in the group that tries to write reports. The table also shows that governing parties have a higher predicted probability than opposition parties of any positive number of reports. The overall picture is hence that governing parties are more likely than opposition parties to write codecision reports. The picture is modified when we investigate the effect of being represented in the Council within the two main party groups. In particular, we see a different pattern within the PES compared with the overall pattern and with the pattern within the EPP. Whereas being a governing party increases the predicted probability of any positive number of codecision reports within the EPP, being in government has a negative effect on the probability of being allocated between 1 and 3 codecision reports within the PES. The effect of being a governing party becomes positive only for higher numbers of reports. We also see that, within the two main party groups, it is only national party delegations within PES that have a non-trivial probability of not being involved as codecision rapporteurs at all.

Discussion

As a first step towards a bicameral explanation of legislative politics in the codecision procedure, this paper has investigated how sitting in the Council influences how many codecision reports members of national parties write each year. Modelling the relationship in a signalling context, the importance of credibility was highlighted. To the extent that MEPs from governing parties share policy preferences with their ministers, the model suggested that there would be more of an incentive for governing parties than for opposition parties to write reports. It is less costly for MEPs from parties represented in the Council to obtain reliable information about possible win-sets in Council. The statistical model found support for this assertion. National parties sitting in the Council have a higher expected number of allocated codecision reports than do parties not represented in the Council. This is in line with recent findings that highlight the role of national parties in EU politics [START_REF] Messmer | Taming Labour's MEPs[END_REF][START_REF] Raunio | Losing Independence or Finally Gaining Recognition? Contact between MEPs and National Parties[END_REF][START_REF] Whitaker | Party Control in a Committee-Based Legislature? The Case of the European Parliament[END_REF][START_REF] Whitaker | National Parties in the European Parliament: An Influence in the Committee System?[END_REF]. A next step would be to investigate in more detail the relationship between the rapporteur and the privileged actors in the Council, in particular the Council presidency (e.g. Farrell andHéritier, 2003, 2004).

The results also suggest that shared policy preferences, and not just formal membership, increase the number of reports. During the period under investigation, the Council was predominantly populated by social democratic parties. We saw that opposition parties from the social democratic party group (PES) were even more active than governing parties as codecision rapporteurs. This seems to suggest that party group might play a role in facilitating the transmission of information. This is in line with the literature, which emphasizes the importance of transnational party groups in structuring behaviour in the Parliament in particular [START_REF] Hix | Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979-2001[END_REF] and in the whole of the EU political system more generally [START_REF] Hix | The Emerging EC Party System? The European Party Federations in the Intergovernmental Conference[END_REF].

The model may provide a framework for studying the Conciliation Committee negotiations. It has been argued that the Parliament might have the upper hand in conciliation negotiations because it may be more patient than the Council [START_REF] Rittberger | Impatient Legislators and New Issue-Dimensions: A Critique of the Garrett-Tsebelis "Standard Version" of Legislative Politics[END_REF]. One possibility would be to compare the common position of the Council and the second reading's EP amendments with the outcome of the Conciliation Committees, because these documents form the basis for the conciliation negotiations.

If the model provides some insights into EU legislative politics, it should also be able to explain the design of the codecision procedure and why governments have increased its scope through consecutive treaty reforms. This is an issue of controversy in the EU literature [START_REF] Moravcsik | Explaining the Treaty of Amsterdam: Interests, Influence, Institutions[END_REF]Hix, 2002a). Although the reform of the Codecision procedure may have reduced the power of the Commission [START_REF] Crombez | Institutional Reform and Co-Decision in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Tsebelis | Legislative Politics in the European Union[END_REF], it potentially gives more power to the Council presidency, its working groups and the EP rapporteur by allowing for early agreement. The EP's absolute majority requirement for amending the common position of the Council, combined with a decrease in the payoff from having the legislation adopted at a later stage and uncertainty regarding the outcome, may be sufficient punishment to induce truth-telling by both the rapporteur and the privileged groups in the Council [START_REF] Farrell | Interorganizational Negotiation and Intraorganizational Power in Shared Decision Making: Early Agreements under Codecision and Their Impact on the European Parliament and Council[END_REF][START_REF] Strøm | Parliamentary Committees in European Democracies[END_REF]. The condition is that the privileged actors in the Council and the EP rapporteur prefer the qualified majority pivot in the Council to adopt a coordinated position rather than proposing its own recommendation to the Council. The qualified majority pivot will also have to prefer adopting the coordinated suggestion to any other winnable proposal. By allowing legislation to be adopted at the Council's first reading, the cost of non-agreement seems to suggest that legislative stalemates should occur only on policies where the cost of delay is low relative to the potential cost of a policy change. Both the rapporteur and the privileged actors in the Council have incentives to coordinate their signals, and the pivotal government also has a bigger incentive to make concessions on the more urgent policies. Hence, reform of the procedure to allow for the adoption of codecision legislation in the Council's first reading makes the EU legislative process more efficient when it is necessary, while allowing for lengthier negotiations when the potential policy implications are high. It therefore allows for both efficiency and political contestation.

Finally, if there are differences between rapporteurs with different characteristics in the probability of securing the optimal policy payoff on behalf of their principal, this should have implications for how reports are allocated within committees and how parties allocate committee assignments amongst their members. Studies of committee assignments have focused on either describing the distribution of reports amongst different subgroups of the EP (e.g. [START_REF] Mamadouh | The Committee System: Powers, Appointments and Report Allocation[END_REF], testing distributive and informational models [START_REF] Kaeding | Rapporteurship Allocation in the European Parliament: Information of Distribution?[END_REF] or investigating to what extent committee assignments can be used to discipline members [START_REF] Mcelroy | Committees and Party Cohesion in the European Parliament[END_REF]. The power of the EP committees, and of their rapporteurs, party group coordinators and chairmen, is often highlighted (e.g. [START_REF] Tsebelis | Conditional Agenda-Setting and Decision-Making inside the European Parliament[END_REF][START_REF] Wurzel | The Role of the European Parliament: Interview with Ken Collins MEP[END_REF], and the EP rules of procedure make it easier for committee members than for non-committee members to amend legislation, but it has not been shown that these formal rules correspond to committee protection to the same extent as is assumed in the formal models of legislative organization developed in the American context [START_REF] Cox | Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House[END_REF][START_REF] Gilligan | Collective Decisionmaking and Standing Committees: An Informational Rationale for Restrictive Amendment Procedures[END_REF][START_REF] Shepsle | The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power[END_REF]. The study of the allocation of EP reports and of the legislative organization of the EP would benefit from a careful analysis of the behavioural incentives created by the formal rules regulating floor amendments, in particular at the different stages in the codecision procedure.

Notes

I would like to thank Giacomo Benedetto, Fabio Franchino, Charles H. Franklin, Sara Hagemann, Pierre Hausemer, Simon Hix, Joni Kuha, David J. Marshall, Gerald Schneider, Jennifer Van Heerde and three anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. Financial support from the ESRC is acknowledged.

1

The first-order condition of f = (k i -c i )/c i is fЈ = -(k i /c 2 i ). We see that, as the cost, c, of coordinating their message goes up, the frequency of being involved goes down, holding the rights to be involved, k, constant. The second-order derivative is fЉ = 2k i /c 3 i . Because both k and c are positive, this is always positive. Hence we have found a minimum point. By symmetry we see that, as the cost of being involved goes down, the frequency of involvement goes up. 2

All legislation was collected from www.europarl.eu.int/oeil, May 2004. The dataset is available on the author's webpage: www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/people/ bjorn-hoyland.php 3

If the interaction effect is included in this test, χ 2 = 36.27, p-value ≈ .000.

  Notes: Austria -SPÖ: Social Democratic Party of Austria; ÖVP: Austrian People's Party; FPÖ: Freedom Party of Austria. Belgium -Agalev: (Flemish) ecologists; CVP: (Flemish) Christian People's Party; Ecolo: (Walloon) ecologists; FDF: (Brussels) Democratic Front of Francophones; PRL: (Walloon) Liberal Reformist Party; PS: (Walloon) Socialist Party; SP: (Flemish) Socialist Party (from 2001, SP.A); VLD: Flemish Liberals and Democrats. Denmark -KF: Conservative People's Party; V: Venstre, 'Left', or Liberal Party; RV: Radical (Left-Social) Liberal Party; SD: Social Democracy in Denmark; Germany -SPD: Social Democratic Party; Die Grünen: The Greens. Finland -KOK: national Coalition Party; SDP: Finnish Social Democratic Party; SFP: Swedish People's Party in Finland; VAS: Left-Wing Alliance; VIHR: Green League. France -PS: Socialist Party; UDF: Union for French Democracy (confederation to 1998; then single party); RPR: Rally for the Republic (disbanded 21 Sep 2002); PCF: French Communist Party; PRS: Radical Socialist Party (then PRG); PRG: Radical Party of the Left; MDC: Citizens' Movement; DL: Liberal Democracy; Les Verts: The Greens. Greece -PASOK: Panhellenic Socialist Movement. Ireland -FF: Fianna Fáil; PD: Progressive Democrats. Italy -DC: Christian Democracy; DS: Democrats of the Left; D: Democrats; FI: Forward (Forza) Italy; LN: Northern League; AN: National Alliance; CCD: Christian Democratic Centre; CDU: United Christian Democrats; PPI: Italian People's Party; RI: Italian Renewal; UDR: Democratic Union for the Republic; FV: Federation of Greens; PDCI: Party of the Italian Communists; SDI: Italian Democratic Socialists; Udeur: Union of the Democratic European Reformers. Luxembourg -CSV: Christian Social People's Party; LSAP: Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party; DP: Democratic Party. Netherlands -CDA: Christian Democratic Appeal; PvdA: Labour Party; VVD: People's Party for Freedom and Democracy; D66: Democrats 66; LPF: List Pim Fortuyn. Portugal -PSD: Social Democratic Party; PS: Socialist Party; CDS-PP: Social Democratic Centre-Popular Party. Spain -PP: Partido Popular. Sweden -SAP: Social Democratic Labour Party. United Kingdom -LP: Labour Party Source: http://www.terra.es/personal2/monolith/00europa.htm.

Table 1

 1 Governing parties in the 15 EU member states 1999-2003, as of 1 January each year

		1999	2000	2001	2002	2003
	Austria	SPÖ/ ÖVP	SPÖ/ ÖVP	ÖVP + FPÖ	ÖVP + FPÖ	ÖVP + FPÖ
	Belgium	CVP + PSC + SP + PS	VLD + PRL/FDF + SP +	VLD + PRL/FDF + SP + PS + VLD + PRL/FDF + SP +	VLD + PRL/FDF + SP + PS +
			PS + Ecolo + Agalev	Ecolo + Agalev	PS + Ecolo + Agalev	Ecolo + Agalev
	Denmark	SD + RV	SD + RV	SD + RV	V + KF	V + KF
	Germany	SPD + Die Grünen	SPD + Die Grünen	SPD + Die Grünen	SPD + Die Grünen	SPD + Die Grünen
	Finland	SDP + KOK + SFP +	SDP + KOK + SFP +	SDP + KOK + SFP +	SDP + KOK + SFP +	SDP + KOK + SFP +
		VAS + VIHR	VAS + VIHR	VAS + VIHR	VAS + VIHR	VAS + VIHR
	France	PS + PCF + PRS +	PS + PCF + PRS +	PS + PCF + PRS/PRG +	PS + PCF + PRS/PRG +	RPR + UDF + DL
		MDC + Verts	MDC + Verts	MDC + Verts	MDC + Verts
	Greece	PASOK	PASOK	PASOK	PASOK	PASOK
	Ireland	FF + PD	FF + PD	FF + PD	FF + PD	FF + PD
	Italy	DS + PPI + RI + UDR +	DS + PPI + RI + PDCI +	DS + PPI + RI + PDCI +	FI + AN + LN + CCD + CDU FI + AN + LN + CCD + CDU
		PDCI + FV + SDI	FV + D + Udeur	FV + D + Udeur + SDI
	Luxembourg	CSV + LSAP	CSV + DP	CSV + DP	CSV + DP	CSV + DP
	Netherlands	PvdA + VVD + D66	PvdA + VVD + D66	PvdA + VVD + D66	PvdA + VVD + D66	CDA + VVD + LPF
	Portugal	PS	PS	PS	PS	PSD + CDS-PP
	Spain	PP	PP	PP	PP	PP
	Sweden	SAP	SAP	SAP	SAP	SAP
	UK	LP	LP	LP	LP	LP

Table 2

 2 Conditional mean number of codecision reports by party group

Table 3

 3 Zero-inflated negative binomial model: allocation of codecison reports, annually, by national party

	Model 1	Model 2
	-

Table 4

 4 Factor change in the expected number of codecision reports

	Model 1	Model 2
	-

Table 5

 5 Change in predicted annual number of codecision reports by representation in the Council of Ministers

				Governing Opposition Governing Opposition
	Number			parties	parties	parties	parties
	of reports	Government Opposition from PES	from PES	from EPP	from EPP
	Expected number .688	.507	.844	.929	.595	.438
	Always 0	.002	.001	.467	.203	.000	.000
	0	.525	.617	.601	.482	.570	.657
	1	.318	.284	.162	.265	.304	.265
	2	.115	.079	.117	.150	.097	.064
	3	.033	.017	.066	.066	.024	.012
	4	.008	.003	.032	.025	.005	.002
	5 or more	.002	.001	.022	.012	.001	.000

European Union Politics 7(1)