Thomas König

Discontinuity Another Source of the EU's Democratic Deficit?

This study evaluates discontinuity induced by the two-stage law-making process of EU directives, which is discussed in the jurisprudential literature as another source of democratic deficit. Directives must be transposed into national law, but lengthy deadlines raise normative questions about the extent to which governments of today can politically and reliably commit domestic majorities of tomorrow. The potential for discontinuity is analysed using transposition data in 15 member states and preference indicators over the last 20 years. The findings reveal that parliaments are largely excluded from this process and that the preferences of the previous and the newly elected representatives often differ considerably, particularly in countries where public support for European integration has declined in recent years.

Discontinuity in two-stage EU law-making

This article investigates a constitutional element of democratic government, namely the temporal restriction of political authority and power, which has been disregarded in the political science literature on the EU's democratic deficit (see, for this debate, e.g. [START_REF] Dehousse | Institutional Reform in the European Community: Are There Alternatives to the Majoritarian Avenue? Florence[END_REF][START_REF] Majone | Europe's "Democratic Deficit": The Question of Standards[END_REF][START_REF] Majone | The Credibility of Community Regulation[END_REF][START_REF] Moravcsik | In Defence of the "Democratic Deficit": Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Follesdal | Why There Is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and Moravcsik[END_REF][START_REF] Rittberger | Building Europe's Parliament: Democratic Representation beyond the Nation-State[END_REF]. Much of this literature focuses on the distribution of power in EU legislative decisionmaking, in particular on whether the European Parliament (EP) is involved or not, but it remains an open question whether and to what extent representatives of today can commit the representatives of tomorrow, who can hardly block, change or amend the decisions of previous representatives [START_REF] Pernice | Diskontinuität und Europäisches Recht: Legitimitätsprobleme im europäischen Verfassungsverbund[END_REF]. In contrast to the provisions in the member states, in which the authority and the policy-making activities of elected representatives usually end with dissolution, or the ending of parliamentary sessions or the conclusion of the legislative term, and in which pending initiatives usually die in order to prevent discontinuity between the mandate and policy-making (for more details, see Döring, 1995: 242), Commission proposals do not die, nor does EU law-making allow for the direct control of representatives in a temporally limited fashion. In particular, the implementation of directives induces a potential for discontinuity by conventionally establishing a twoyear transposition period, in which newly elected representatives may be obliged to implement decisions of the previous government without having a realistic chance of amendment or revision in a timely fashion. 1 From a normative perspective, discontinuity poses a legitimacy problem, particularly in systems with strong checks and balances. It also threatens high agency loss when the principal -the directly elected parliamentary representatives of voters -lacks control over the governmental agents and is unable to learn about their preferences. However, a positive evaluation of the empirical impact of discontinuity first requires identification of the extent to which:

(i) governments of today can politically and reliably commit majorities of tomorrow, (ii) previous and current representatives differ in their preferences, and (iii) these new majorities are able to learn about the implementation process.

Hence, the following analysis of discontinuity may point to another possible source of the democratic deficit in the EU. Discontinuity is directly related to the discussion about the involvement of the EP because, although moral hazard and adverse selection problems usually give the (parliamentary) principal incentives to gather information about the (governmental) agent (Lupia, 2003: 4), such learning is seriously restricted in the two-stage process of EU law-making. In this two-stage process, the EP is still not completely involved, and 'governmental' agents can increase their discretionary power by hiding their preferences in secret Council negotiations as well as bypassing their parliaments when they implement legislative decisions [START_REF] König | The (Il)loyal Agent. A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation into Delegates' Discretion in the Negotiations over a Constitution for Europe[END_REF]. This suggests that discontinuity allows for power to expand over time, and neither the parliamentary majority nor the voter can find out whether and how the government was unwilling or unable to support the preferences of the principal.

The following analysis will provide empirical insight into the potential for discontinuity in the two-stage decision-making process of EU directives. The major empirical challenges are to find out whether and to what extent the parliamentary principal can learn ex ante and ex post about the governmental agent's behaviour, and to identify discontinuity problems by changing coalitions and preferences during the implementation process in all member states. For this purpose, longitudinal information is used on the transposition history of all directives in 15 member states and on governmental preferences from January 1986 to February 2003 (the entry into force of the Nice Treaty). In addition to information on Commission proposals and EP participation, the database includes 1569 directives and their transposition records in the member states. 2 This sample of more than 8000 observations will provide a solid empirical answer to two questions on the amount and extent of (i) domestic parliamentary inclusion in EU law-making by directives, and (ii) discontinuity with respect to member state elections as well as changes in government and coalition preferences.

The analysis attempts to answer whether and to what extent EU law-making suffers from a parliamentary deficit at the EU and domestic level, and whether and to what extent the EU requires the implementation of directives adopted by a previous government, possibly by another coalition with quite different preferences. In addition to the potential for change via elections, the analysis also specifies whether and how often governmental composition changed in the period between the adoption of the directive and notification of national transposition measures as reported by the member states. However, since governmental composition can change despite preferences remaining the same, and, conversely, governmental composition can remain stable despite changes in preferences, this study proposes the use of party manifestos to identify sector-specific and EU-related governmental (coalition) preferences.

The study then introduces the problem of discontinuity and discusses the lack of direct control of governmental agents, while also providing insight into parliamentary involvement in the law-making of directives. Furthermore, the conventional domestic rules established to prevent discontinuity are included as a web appendix for the 15 member states, 3 revealing a large discrepancy between domestic and EU provisions. Finally, discontinuity is empirically examined with respect to electoral events, governmental coalition and preference changes. The findings show that the two-stage process associated with directives not only curtails ex ante and ex post parliamentary control but also establishes a notable potential for discontinuity. In the period between the adoption of a directive and the specified transposition deadline, elections and governmental change are found in about one-third of all cases. More importantly, governmental preferences change within the course of most national transposition processes, even though these changes primarily refer to sector-specific policy-making. In some countries, such as Austria, Sweden and France, we find notable preference changes between the government that agreed to Community legislation and the one responsible for implementing it, suggesting a high potential for discontinuity problems.

Democracy and discontinuity -A comparative view on temporal power

The continuity of representative democracy requires the temporal specification of authority and power. In contrast to inheritance, which ties the hands of newly elected governments with existing legislation and previously adopted programmes [START_REF] Rose | Inheritance in Public Policy: Change without Choice in Britain[END_REF], this temporal specification is designed to avoid discontinuity in a formal and material sense as well as among personnel [START_REF] Pernice | Diskontinuität und Europäisches Recht: Legitimitätsprobleme im europäischen Verfassungsverbund[END_REF]. In almost all democracies, discontinuity in personnel is conventionally prohibited by displacing the president and the dissolution of parliament, which usually includes all activities and parliamentary committees. Material discontinuity concerns legislative decisionmaking and is usually avoided by settling initiatives at the end of the term, except for those cases not requiring formal adoption [START_REF] Döring | Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe[END_REF]. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, this kind of parliamentary supremacy is more of a 'gentlemen's agreement with constitutional character', whereas in countries such as Germany scholars interpret this practice as common law. These provisions attempt to guarantee the temporal aspect of democracy and are, thus, a fundamental constitutional element of representative democracy in the member states of the EU.

In particular, in the normative jurisprudential literature, the central assertion is that discontinuity threatens to violate this principle [START_REF] Pernice | Diskontinuität und Europäisches Recht: Legitimitätsprobleme im europäischen Verfassungsverbund[END_REF]. The most important facet of discontinuity concerns legislative decision-making, which sometimes involves institutions and legislative bodies with permanent representation, such as the Austrian and German Bundesrat as well as the Council of Ministers. These bodies often represent (part of) the regional constituents of the political system, even though their delegates may change and are sometimes replaced after elections. However, owing to their permanent representative function, initiatives made within these bodies are not necessarily settled at the end of the legislative term, either in the German or in the EU case. Other examples of possible discontinuity exist in only two EU countries, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. According to [START_REF] Grey | Procedure for Passing Legislation[END_REF], bills die at the end of the legislative term or with parliamentary dissolution in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal (every four years), as well as in France (every five years). In three of these countries (France, Ireland and Portugal), a provision exists for carrying a bill over after dissolution or expired legislative period. In Denmark and the United Kingdom, where parliamentary sittings are divided into sessions ranging from six months to a year, bills die at the end of the session or with dissolution. Sweden has a unique provision leading to the expiry of bills if they are not decided upon within one year of their introduction.

The web appendix supplements and specifies the information provided in [START_REF] Grey | Procedure for Passing Legislation[END_REF] survey. With the exception of Luxembourg and the Netherlands, time limits are generally imposed on the passage of bills, and these are usually restricted to the current legislative term or session. In Denmark, the United Kingdom and Sweden, bills die at the end of session. Belgium, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Austria and Portugal usually limit legislative activities at the end of the legislative period or dissolution. In Germany and Austria, dissolution and continuity apply only to the Bundestag. In France, the Senate can still adopt a proposal from the dissolved national assembly under closed rule, whereas governmental and parliamentary bills usually expire with a change of government (Schorn, 2000: 43-54). Belgian bills can survive dissolution or the end of the legislative period if they have already found approval in one of the Houses.

Although these formal hurdles exist for national legislation to prevent discontinuity, the EU has established a two-stage law-making process that allows for the exclusion of parliaments and the shifting of political accountability over time. The most common example of this two-stage process in the EU is the transposition of directives, which defines binding and enforceable guidelines for policy-making that have to be implemented by the national legislator within a given period (König and Luetgert, 2005). From a political science view, the conventional two-year transposition period of EU directives -which may be extended to several years in the event of successive treaty violation procedures or successful member state petition to extend the official deadline -risks a Jack-in-the-Box effect. Although there are several reasons for continued transposition delay, including political, economic or administrative restrictions, the possibility of governmental and/or preference change begs the question of how much this obligation matters for the newly elected government.

In principle, such requirements do not necessarily threaten the legitimacy of a political system, because the newly elected government can usually revise or amend the previous government's decision. However, compared to a few member states where discontinuity problems may also arise, the EU has established a restrictive voting system that makes revisions and amendments by the newly elected government almost impossible. This system requires not only that the Commission submits an initiative in the interests of the newly elected representative, but also that the Council adopts the proposal by either unanimity or a qualified majority of about 72% of Council votes in an enlarged EU, sometimes followed by the necessary support of the EP. This increases the potential of a Jack-in-the-Box effect, which threatens to dilute democratic accountability and legitimization for political decisions, because parliament and voters are unable to control the policy-making of their delegated representatives with their electoral vote. Even if the results of the directive are not supported by the current majority, both the government and (sometimes) the parliament are obligated to adopt the measures appropriate for implementing the directive and are hardly able to initiate amendments or to change this policy.

Compared with the political and scholarly debate on the EU's democratic deficit, which has drawn attention to the powers of the EP, few insights and -to my knowledge -no empirical study exist on the discontinuity potential induced by the two-stage process of EU directives. Some might argue that the increasing participation of the EP is sufficient guarantee of the direct link between principal and agent in EU law-making. Figure 1 shows the number of binding legislative cases (regulations, directives and decisions) together with EP involvement from the mid-1980s to the coming into force of the Nice Treaty in 2003 [START_REF] König | Quantifying European Legislative Research. Using CELEX and PRELEX in EU Legislative Studies[END_REF]. A quick inspection seems to confirm [START_REF] Hix | The Political System of the European Union[END_REF] finding of a significantly higher inclusion of the EP. However, the absolute number of cases involving EP participation has hardly increased in recent years. The rate of parliamentary participation is increasing only because the number of regulations and decisions has drastically decreased since the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, whereas the number of directives has remained constant over time.

These findings on the relatively low participation rate of the EP and the higher relative importance of directives raise doubts about the EP's ability to guarantee accountability, and draw attention to the second stage of EU lawmaking, where national parliaments can be involved in the implementation process. To reduce agency loss and to identify the discontinuity potential, the question is to what extent this implementation process includes national parliaments, particularly when the coalition and/or the preferences of the majority have changed. Put differently, if a parliamentary majority of tomorrow could control and revise the decisions of today's governments, discontinuity should pose no problem for the legitimacy of law-making; if parliaments are able to learn about this process, discontinuity should pose a minor problem because parliaments could make attempts to develop a counter-strategy. However, if parliaments lack control and even information about this process owing to their exclusion from policy-making, the question is to what extent this process forces a member state to implement decisions when the coalition and/or the preferences of the majority have changed. When the majority neither knows what its governmental agent has promoted, nor is informed about the implementation of the previous agent's decision, discontinuity will increase agency loss and raise a serious legitimacy problem induced by the (growing) importance of directives.

Discontinuity without parliamentary control

The two-stage process of directives formally offers national parliaments ex ante and ex post influence when the legislation is adopted at the EU level and Notes: These data refer to the 8475 decisions (D), directives (L) and regulations (R) proposed by the Commission and documented in [START_REF] König | Quantifying European Legislative Research. Using CELEX and PRELEX in EU Legislative Studies[END_REF]. The applied legislative procedure is documented in PreLex.

when it is implemented at the national level. However, although criticism of the EU's legitimacy centres around the parliamentary deficit, and although the Amsterdam Treaty declares that domestic parliaments have an important role in legitimizing the positions of governmental representatives in the Council, a number of studies suggest that the member states vary little in the modest extent to which they allow parliaments to participate in the preparation of their governmental position on Commission proposals. In a recent study on domestic preference formation on Commission proposals, [START_REF] Baltz | Immer noch ein etatistischer Kontinent: Die Bildung nationaler Positionen zu EU-Verhandlungen[END_REF] find that only the 'Scandinavian' model offers parliaments some access to this ex ante coordination process, whereas other countries rarely include their parliaments and prefer to coordinate their national position on Commission proposals among their ministries. Similarly, [START_REF] König | The (Il)loyal Agent. A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation into Delegates' Discretion in the Negotiations over a Constitution for Europe[END_REF] demonstrate for the EU constitution-building process that this executive model also dominates national position formation for the preparation of constitutional policies. This suggests that the member states themselves made a significant contribution to the parliamentary deficit in EU legislative decision-making. The governments of the member states have considerable discretion in deciding about the ex ante inclusion of their own parliament, but most parliaments are excluded from this process and receive little information about EU legislative decision-making, which induces -in the terminology of the principal-agent literature -problems of moral hazard [START_REF] Lupia | Busy Voters, Agenda Control and the Power of Information[END_REF]. Accordingly, the national parliaments, as directly elected representatives and principals, regularly lack information about the governmental agent's action, thus allowing the agent to choose her/his own views, including the possibility of adverse selection owing to the secret nature of Council negotiations [START_REF] Brehm | Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public[END_REF]. As a result, parliamentary ex ante control and influence on the making of directives are very limited, whereas governments have significant discretionary power in the relevant EU negotiations.

A second possibility for parliamentary involvement in EU legislative decision-making may exist ex post during the implementation stage of directives, which could offer the opportunity to learn about agent actions from others. Whereas parliamentarians are directly elected, are more politically concerned about voters' interests and will amend legislation accordingly, the executive prefers usually to focus on the technical problems of policymaking. For Majone, the EU is a regulatory agency addressing market failures, which by definition produces Pareto-efficient outcomes and lacks not democratic foundation but credibility [START_REF] Majone | The European Community between Social Policy and Social Regulation[END_REF][START_REF] Majone | The Credibility of Community Regulation[END_REF]. However, since this agency will implement prior (Pareto-efficient) legislation even in the event of major preference change, the exclusion of parliamentary involvement should increase the risks of discontinuity. The exclusion of 'regulatory' directives is particularly problematic in terms of potential discontinuity: these directives are adopted by either the Commission, the Council, or the Council and the EP and require transposition into the domestic law of member states, which is formally monitored by the Commission. According to Article 249, a directive is binding, as to the result to be achieved, upon each member state to which it is addressed, but leaves the choice of transposition instrument to the national authorities. If the Commission decides that a member state has failed to fulfil an obligation, it delivers a reasoned opinion on the matter after giving that state the opportunity to submit its observations. If the state does not comply with the opinion within the period laid down by the Commission, the Commission may bring the matter before the European Court of Justice (Article 226), and significant sanctions can be imposed, according to Article 228, in the event of further violation.

Member states typically have to notify the implementing measures intended to achieve the results of the directive within a two-year period, even if it contradicts national law. Formally, member states cannot justify delay by domestic problems or restrictions because the supremacy of EU legislation and the obligation to implement directives dominate any national provision, even if this provision is a constitutional element [START_REF] Prechal | Directives in Europe and Community Law: A Study of Directives and Their Enforcement in National Courts[END_REF]. This means that the implementation of directives does not require any additional ratification procedure and forces domestic legislative bodies to act in the interest of the directive's results. Not only are delay and ineffective implementation punishable by monetary sanctions or provisions for liability, but the principle of direct applicability also obliges national courts to rule in conformity with the directive. Yet member states differ in their implementation record, and the Commission does not prosecute all infringements [START_REF] König | Unitarisierung durch Europäisierung?[END_REF][START_REF] König | The (Il)loyal Agent. A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation into Delegates' Discretion in the Negotiations over a Constitution for Europe[END_REF]. Table 1 lists the number of adopted directives and the notification record of each member state.

Based on the Celex Sector 7 database, Table 1 lists in detail how many directives applied to each member state, whether these member states reported a transposition measure or not, the number of pending directives at the time of data collection, the number of directives with a missing transposition deadline, as well as the number of measures lacking a machine-readable date of transposition despite member state notification. Between 730 and 1600 directives in total required transposition (resulting in 21,387 country*directive observations), and between 454 (Austria) and 1229 (Portugal) directives document transposition with at least one measure. At the time of data collection, 18 directives were still pending, and member states failed to indicate a national transposition deadline for between 57 and 193 directives. Between 12 and 155 cases had no adoption date for reported measures, and for between 63 and 279 cases we lack reported data on the transposition measure despite the expiry of the deadline. To investigate all 'regular' cases, this study considers only those transposition measures that were reported in the period between the adoption of the directive and the notification deadline. Upon closer inspection, this sample comprises 8382 member state transposition responses (country*directive) passed on time between 1 January 1986 and 1 February 2003 and having a transposition deadline prior to the date of the data collection in 1 November 2004. 4 Note that only directives passed after the accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden on 1 January 1995 are included in this sample.

Since neither the inclusion of third parties in 'fire-alarm oversight' nor 'policy patrol oversight' -where the principals undertake most of the oversight themselves -can remedy the parliamentary information deficit, the question is how often parliaments are involved in the transposition stage, and how little ex post control parliaments have over their governmental agents. Figures 2 and3 refer to the instruments notified by member states within the prescribed transposition period. For some directives, a member state notified several instruments, in particular a series of secondary instruments such as regulations, decrees and circulars. To distinguish between the bureaucratic nature of this process and the question of whether or not parliaments are excluded, Figure 2 shows the annual share of parliamentary and nonparliamentary instruments used to implement directives, while Figure 3 illustrates the extent to which parliament was or was not involved.

Unsurprisingly, some member states, in particular the United Kingdom and Ireland, exclude their parliaments almost completely from this second stage and transpose directives wherever possible with non-parliamentary instruments, such as regulations and statutory instruments. According to Figure 2, more than 85% of all measures used for the transposition of directives in the member states are non-parliamentary instruments, and less than 15% directly involve domestic parliaments. This trend towards bureaucratic implementation of directives is visible for almost all member states over time and across most policy sectors [START_REF] König | The (Il)loyal Agent. A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation into Delegates' Discretion in the Negotiations over a Constitution for Europe[END_REF]. Even in countries that officially emphasize parliamentary participation, governments more and more refer to previous legislation as the legal basis for amendments and use non-parliamentary instruments in the transposition of directives.

Figure 3 shows changes in the annual aggregate statistics of national parliamentary involvement for individual directives. As with the relative share of involvement illustrated in Figure 2, we see that parliaments have little to say in absolute numbers too. Only in Austria, and to a lesser extent in Denmark, Finland and Germany, do we find parliamentary participation in almost half of the implementation cases; the average participation rate is only about 15%. These figures clearly demonstrate that parliamentary ex post 0 0.4 0.8 0 0.4 0.8 0 0.4 0.8 0 0.4 0.8 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 1986 1990 1994 Notes: These data were extracted from Celex Sector 7 and include all transposition measures adopted between the promulgation of a directive and its deadline (downloaded 1 November 2004). For Austria, Finland and Sweden, the data include only directives enacted during the period of their membership (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002).

N = 8382 transposition measures. 0 0.4 0.8 0 0.4 0.8 0 0.4 0.8 0 0.4 0.8 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 1986 1990 1994 Notes: These data were extracted from Celex Sector 7 and include all transposition measures adopted between the promulgation of a directive and its deadline (downloaded 1 November 2004). For Austria, Finland and Sweden, the data include only directives enacted during the period of their membership (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002).

N = 8382 transposition measures.

control hardly exists, revealing a large potential for agency loss, in particular when the governmental agent is unwilling or unable to serve the parliamentary principal's interest. Only if the principal were to have complete information about the governmental agent's actions could agency losses be minimized, but the high degree of parliamentary exclusion prohibits the acquisition of information on EU law-making. As an extreme example, a 'liberal' policy that was contested by the opposition in a national electoral campaign and rejected by the voters could be implemented by bureaucratic means without parliamentary knowledge.

Directives: Electoral, governmental and preference change

With regard to the very limited possibilities for parliamentary control, the identification of potential discontinuity in EU law-making demands empirical evaluation of the two-stage law-making process, which is an ambitious task for 15 countries over time. In general, the two-stage nature of this process implies that the results are determined by two developments: (i) the number of directives and the number of domestic elections, and (ii) government and preference change in the member states. A quick inspection of the EU legislative record has already revealed that the number of directives has remained relatively constant over the past 20 years, whereas the annual number of regulations dramatically decreased from about 500 at the beginning of the 1990s to well under 100 by the beginning of this century (see Figure 1).

Without considering the qualitative nature of EU legislation, this suggests that directives -and thus discontinuity in the implementation process -are becoming relatively more important for the evaluation of EU law-making.

Looking at the number of directives and the number of domestic elections, 2539 national responses from the total sample of 8382 cases were potentially subject to discontinuity via elections. In Denmark, Austria, Portugal, Germany and Italy in particular, many cases were subject to elections during the transposition period. On closer inspection, 2145 cases experienced governmental change, a few without elections owing to a change of coalition partners during the legislative term. This potential for discontinuity empirically affects almost 30% of all member state transposition efforts. Table 2 reveals much variation between the member states: as a result of coalition instability, more than half of the Italian cases and almost one-third of the Austrian cases were subject to governmental change, whereas only 4% of British, 10% of Finnish and 15% of German cases experienced governmental change during the process. Unsurprisingly, the amount of governmental change is lower than the number of elections, but every member state experienced governmental change during the transposition of some directives. However, as already mentioned, elections and governmental change are rather crude indicators of discontinuity. For example, governments might be re-elected and have similar preferences in the following legislative term, and this would raise little concern about a potential democratic deficit or lack of legitimacy. A more important indicator of discontinuity would be a change in governmental preferences, i.e. the preferences of the previous government differ from those of the newly elected government that is responsible for the implementation of the previous government's activity. Although there is no indicator for governmental preferences on each directive, I propose using party manifestos to identify governmental (coalition) preferences across policy sectors and over time [START_REF] König | Convergence or Divergence? From Ever-Growing to Ever-Slowing European Decision-making Process[END_REF]. To control for the possibility that a previous government might have been outvoted under Council qualified majority voting and that preference change from the previous to the current government might even include the preferences of the newly elected government in the directive's policy, Tables 3 and4 list the number of national transposition responses related to directives adopted under unanimity in Notes: These data were extracted from Celex Sector 7 (downloaded 1 November 2004). For Austria, Finland and Sweden, the data include only directives enacted during the period of their membership (1995 -2002).

parentheses. These unanimity cases also demonstrate how difficult a change of decision would be for the next government if it had different preferences from the previous government. 5 Using party manifestos for the identification of governmental preferences requires several steps. First, national party manifestos are merged with data on the party composition of the corresponding governments, including the date of their inauguration and dismissal. Secondly, in order to relate these data to policy areas, party positions are computed for specific EU policy sectors such as agriculture, trade and internal market policies. 6 The resulting Notes: These data were extracted from Celex Sector 7 (downloaded 1 November 2004). For Austria, Finland and Sweden, the data include only directives enacted during the period of their membership (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002). Cases in parentheses indicate application of unanimity voting in Council as extrapolated from the Celex data.

set of cases was completed with a European integration dimension, referring to the pro-and anti-European attitude of political parties [START_REF] Hix | Dimensions and Alignments in European Union Politics: Cognitive Constraints and Partisan Responses[END_REF][START_REF] Gabel | Defining the EU Political Space: An Empirical Study of the European Elections Manifestos, 1979-1999[END_REF][START_REF] Hooghe | Does Left/Right Structure Party Positions on European Integration?[END_REF][START_REF] Pennings | The Dimensionality of the EU Policy Space: The European Elections of 1999[END_REF]. This dimension is coded for all proposals in addition to the sector-specific dimension, which varies across all directives to incorporate party preference changes in the respective area of agriculture, common rules, energy/environment or internal market.

To estimate coalition governmental positions, the positions of the coalition parties are averaged. Independent from other coding possibilities, the main advantage is that these positions vary across policy areas and over time. More specifically, the positions provide information on which sector-specific outcomes are preferred by governments over time, and the EU dimension should cover whether a government favours policy-making at the domestic or the EU level.

Looking at the two-stage process and preference change, the top panel of Table 3 shows how often and to what extent the sector-specific preferences of the previous government diverged from those of the government that transposed the directive. No preference change existed in about two-thirds of cases, and minimal change (measured as one standard deviation from the mean) is observable for 632 cases. However, moderate and maximum change 7 existed in almost 2000 cases, and this governmental preference change occurred in both directions. For the unanimity cases (given in parentheses) maximum change existed for 522 out of the total of 2797, meaning that the percentage of major changes is even higher under the unanimity rule. Moreover, we find changes in about 60% of all unanimity cases, which is notably above the average of about 30% for all cases. Looking more closely at the sector-specific cases of maximum preference change, the bottom panel of Table 3 reveals that Austria, Denmark and Sweden most frequently registered such drastic changes, whereas Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain and the UK experienced fairly minimal changes during most national transpositions.

Finally, Table 4 shows governmental preference change regarding whether national legislative competences should (in general) be delegated to the EU level. Compared with Table 3, the number of cases with maximum change is slightly lower, and moderate preference change exists more often with respect to EU affairs. Interestingly, we find more maximum and moderate preference changes in favour of EU integration than against it. This also holds true for cases under unanimity. Applied to the individual member states, Austria, France and Sweden are the outliers in terms of maximum changes, followed by Denmark. Some countries, such as the Netherlands or Finland, almost lack cases of transposition exposed to maximum governmental preference change in European affairs.

Discontinuity and change: Another source of the EU's democratic deficit?

Before examining parliamentary deficit and discontinuity of EU law-making in the member states over a period of more than 15 years, it has been shown that continuity is a central feature of democratic government in all member states, in which political authority and power are temporally limited. Voters assign authority and policy-making power to representatives for a limited period and, in almost all member states, the authority and policy-making activities of the representatives formally end with parliamentary dissolution or the end of legislative terms; thus, pending initiatives usually expire to Notes: These data were extracted from Celex Sector 7 (downloaded 1 November 2004). For Austria, Finland and Sweden, the data include only directives enacted during the period of their membership (1995 -2002). Cases in parentheses indicate application of unanimity voting in Council as extrapolated from the Celex data.

prevent discontinuity between the political mandate and policy-making. Moreover, the newly elected representatives may more easily change the decisions of the previous representatives because domestic voting systems are less restrictive and allow the newly elected majority to initiate, amend and adopt their programmatic issues. In contrast to the situation in the member states, the voting system of the EU allows for hardly any policy change and the two-stage process of EU law-making leads to a high potential for discontinuity between the governmental representatives who adopt directives and those (newly elected) governments that are obliged to implement the decisions of their predecessors.

With respect to the risk of agency loss, we find that parliamentary control is almost absent in this two-stage process of adopting and implementing directives. Except for the Scandinavian countries, the parliaments of the member states have no ex ante control over their governmental agents and are rarely included in the ex post transposition stage. This suggests that only the parliaments of the Scandinavian countries can make attempts to develop a counter-strategy. The empirical analysis reveals that most countries use non-parliamentary instruments to transpose directives, even though they could go through parliament. Parliaments, as the principals, accordingly have little chance to learn about their agents' actions, and agency loss is very likely in the event of a divergence between the interests of the principal and those of the agent. This lack of parliamentary control and involvement threatens to intensify the problems raised by discontinuity because voters and their representatives lose their right to receive valuable information about policy-making when their representatives are de facto excluded from law-making.

The findings from over 15 years of national transposition confirm that the EU carries this risk of discontinuity. In almost one-third of all cases, election and governmental change occur during the time-lag between adoption and transposition. Moreover, in a similar number of cases the preferences between the previous adopting government and the subsequent implementing government sometimes change drastically, but EU law-making obliges the successor government to implement policies supported by the previous government. Because it could be argued that a previous government has been outvoted under qualified majority voting and perhaps pursued the 'wrong' interests of the following majority, this result is controlled for by the fact that such drastic changes also occur under unanimity rule. In particular in Austria and Sweden, and to a lesser extent in Denmark, Greece, France and the Netherlands, the successor government had to implement sectorspecific decisions that were supported by a previous government with very different preferences. In these countries, public support for European integration has also decreased in recent years.

Under these conditions and with respect to the increasingly restrictive voting system of the EU, as well as the growing importance of directives, discontinuity seems to pose a considerable problem for the accountability and legitimacy of EU law-making. On closer inspection of the policy domains, we find that discontinuity hits the internal market domain particularly hard, where the most drastic preference changes occur, followed by common rules. In these domains, there is a large gap between the actors deciding on policies and those who are forced to bear responsibility in the implementation process. At the same time, governments prefer to exclude their parliaments and most frequently use executive instruments to transpose directives. As such, discontinuity may not only create another source of the democratic deficit of EU law-making but also contribute to its increasingly bureaucratic nature.

Notes

I would like to thank Brooke Luetgert for data assistance and helpful comments.

1 According to [START_REF] König | Convergence or Divergence? From Ever-Growing to Ever-Slowing European Decision-making Process[END_REF], the median time-lag between the proposal and adoption of EU initiatives has increased and slowed down decision-making in the last 10 years. In particular, controversial proposals that provide for unanimous voting in the Council and parliamentary participation significantly increase the duration of the legislative process. 2 The 10 new members are excluded from this study because their membership began in May 2004. Thus, their transposition record is too short for a meaningful empirical examination. 3 The appendix is available at www.uni-konstanz.de/eup/issues.htm. 4 Because the average transposition period is two years, the tables and graphs refer to directives passed between 1986 and 2002. The directives from late 2002 and early 2003 were largely pending at the time of data collection. 5 Studies on the Council's voting record report a significant trend towards consensus decision-making among member states and dispute the effective application of qualified majority voting [START_REF] Mattila | Why Unanimity in the Council? A Roll Call Analysis of Council Voting[END_REF][START_REF] Mattila | Contested Decisions -Empirical Analysis of Voting in the EU Council of Ministers[END_REF][START_REF] Heisenberg | The Institution of "Consensus" in the European Union: Formal versus Informal Decision Making in the Council[END_REF]. 6 In order to avoid missing data, the manifesto calculation procedure is applied.

This a mix of policy positions and weights (see [START_REF] Laver | Estimating the Policy Position of Political Actors[END_REF]. 7 The categories describing the amount of governmental preference change refer to the first and second standard deviations around the absolute value of mean sector-specific and mean EU preference change.

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1 Participation of the EP in EU legislation passed between 1984 and 2002.

  Figure in brackets indicates transposition not required.

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2Relative share of parliamentary involvement in the transposition ofEU directives, 1986EU directives, -2002. .

Figure 3

 3 Figure 3Parliamentary involvement (No/Yes -0/1) in the transposition ofEU directives, 1986EU directives, -2002. .

Table 1

 1 EU member states' response toEU directives, 1986EU directives, -2002

	Non-Measure	transposition passed prior
	No adoption	date for
		No available
		Total number

Table 2

 2 Member state transposition instruments subject to national elections and changes ingovernment, 1986-2002

	No
	change in	Change in

Table 3

 3 Sector-specific governmental preference change affecting national transpositionmeasures, 1986-2002

		No	Minimal	Moderate	Maximum
		change	change	change	change	Total
	Direction and extent of change across all member states
	No change	5860 (1752)	0	0	0	5860 (1752)
	Positive change	0	296 (98)	377 (166)	532 (271)	1205 (535)
	Negative change	0	336 (82)	460 (177)	521 (251)	1317 (510)
	Total	5860 (1752) 632 (180)	837 (343)	1053 (522)	8382 (2797)
	Extent of change by member state
	Austria	163 (45)	13 (1)	35 (12)	68 (32)	279 (90)
	Belgium	417 (118)	68 (13)	85 (54)	29 (16)	599 (201)
	Denmark	530 (167)	42 (10)	79 (33)	142 (72)	793 (282)
	Finland	339 (86)	27 (9)	5 (3)	53 (32)	424 (130)
	France	493 (148)	29 (4)	57 (22)	102 (45)	681 (219)
	Germany	369 (108)	79 (19)	47 (22)	72 (42)	567 (191)
	Greece	328 (104)	17 (5)	44 (9)	97 (48)	486 (166)
	Ireland	419 (105)	35 (9)	47 (26)	80 (33)	581 (173)
	Italy	368 (101)	37 (5)	77 (32)	73 (36)	555 (174)
	Luxembourg	409 (140)	24 (10)	80 (31)	37 (19)	550 (200)
	Netherlands	484 (157)	44 (10)	71 (22)	101 (49)	700 (238)
	Portugal	323 (98)	57 (32)	88 (27)	60 (25)	528 (182)
	Spain	567 (184)	38 (12)	55 (14)	69 (35)	729 (245)
	Sweden	177 (54)	11 (5)	2 (0)	53 (33)	243 (92)
	United Kingdom	474 (137)	111 (36)	65 (36)	17 (5)	667 (214)
	Total	5860 (1752) 632 (180)	837 (343)	1053 (522)	8382 (2797)

Table 4

 4 Direction and extent of governmental EU preference change affecting national transposition measures, 1986-2002

	4 2 8	European Union Politics 8(3)
			No	Minimal	Moderate	Maximum
			change	change	change	change	Total
		Direction and extent of change across all member states
		No change	5837 (1748)	0	0	0	5837 (1748)
		Positive change	0	216 (86)	502 (210)	506 (228)	1224 (524)
		Negative change	0	348 (154)	523 (195)	450 (176)	1321 (525)
		Total	5837 (1748) 564 (240)	1025 (405)	956 (404)	8382 (2797)
		Extent of change by member state
		Austria	163 (45)	0	20 (8)	96 (37)	279 (90)
		Belgium	417 (118)	63 (32)	84 (32)	35 (19)	599 (201)
		Denmark	530 (167)	0	101 (50)	162 (65)	793 (282)
		Finland	339 (86)	45 (25)	36 (17)	4 (2)	424 (130)
		France	493 (148)	2 (0)	0	186 (71)	681 (219)
		Germany	369 (108)	0	142 (53)	56 (30)	567 (191)
		Greece	328 (104)	41 (17)	89 (35)	28 (10)	486 (166)
		Ireland	419 (105)	62 (26)	31 (9)	69 (33)	581 (173)
		Italy	368 (101)	1 (1)	134 (50)	52 (22)	555 (174)
		Luxembourg	409 (140)	0	49 (25)	92 (35)	550 (200)
		Netherlands	484 (157)	82 (28)	134 (53)	0	700 (238)
		Portugal	323 (98)	128 (55)	57 (20)	20 (9)	528 (182)
		Spain	567 (184)	82 (32)	37 (8)	43 (21)	729 (245)
		Sweden	154 (50)	0	36 (20)	53 (22)	243 (92)
		United Kingdom	474 (137)	58 (24)	75 (25)	60 (28)	667 (214)
		Total	5837 (1748) 564 (240)	1025 (405)	956 (404)	8382 (2797)

European Union Politics 8(3)

About the author

Thomas König is Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, A5, University of Mannheim, 68131 Mannheim, Germany. Fax: +49(0) 6211 812072 E-mail: koenig@uni-mannheim.de


Gail Mcelroy

Legislative Politics as Normal? Voting Behaviour and Beyond in the European Parliament

The publication of Democratic Politics in the European Parliament [START_REF] Hix | Democratic Politics in the European Parliament[END_REF] presents a welcome opportunity to reflect on the significant advances that have been made in recent years in the study of legislative organization in the EP. It allows us to examine the present state of this field and to identify some areas that remain under-researched and even neglected in current research agendas. In and of itself, any study that so forcefully and convincingly confronts the conventional wisdom that the European Parliament (EP) is an ineffectual, irrelevant institution deserves a wide readership. However, this book represents much more than simply a study of legislative behaviour in the only directly elected European Union (EU) institution. It addresses much larger questions about the origins of political parties and party discipline, the nature of party competition and the potential for representative democracy in a complex political environment. This book will be of interest not just to those immersed in the political system of the EP but also to party scholars and legislative watchers more generally and indeed even to democratic theorists concerned about the possibility for representative democracy in the EU.

The field of legislative politics has long been dominated by studies of the United States Congress. This congressional research has generated a remarkable body of scholarship, which has remained largely untested beyond the congressional experience for too long. In the past decade however, there has been a conscious and concerted effort on the part of EP scholars, led in no small part by the authors of this book, to extend these theories into a comparative context. This book represents a very deliberate effort to connect legislative studies of the European Parliament to this wider body of literature and to shake off the mantle of the 'sui generis' approach that has frequently and regrettably governed EU studies.

The overarching argument running through this book is that political groups in the European Parliament have become fully institutionalized; they dominate decision-making and are very similar animals to their national counterparts. The bulk of the book is dedicated to demonstrating that the political groups have become increasingly cohesive over time and that politics in the Parliament has been 'normalized', in that party competition is along ideological rather than territorial dimensions. An impressive amount of data, both quantitative and qualitative, is marshalled to convincingly demonstrate the validity of these arguments, and the book's contribution to legislative studies and EU politics is indisputable. The book combines theoretical rigour with equally rigorous and systematic testing of the main hypotheses and it greatly enriches and advances our understanding of the political dynamics that operate within the European Parliament.

The first three chapters of the book present the theoretical framework for the analysis that follows. Chapter three in particular deserves close reading; it is here that the main theoretical argument is developed. The authors theorize that, contrary to conventional wisdom, we should not expect to observe territorial politics in action in the European Parliament. They hypothesize that territorial conflicts are devolved to lower levels of decision-making within a federal structure where they can be resolved most efficiently. However, certain conflicts (particularly economic ones) generate inefficiencies if resolved at the territorial level and that power in these policy areas is best retained at the federal level. The theory thus predicts that party competition should be along ideological dimensions within federal chambers and the remainder of the book is concerned with finding confirmatory evidence to this effect. Chapters four and five present empirical evidence that participation rates in voting have increased over time and that cohesion has risen concomitantly with the increasing powers of the Parliament itself. Chapter six examines whether or not political group control of the agenda is sufficient to enforce party discipline. Chapter seven considers the tension that may come to bear on members of the European Parliament (MEPs) when there is a conflict of interests between their national party and their EP political group. Chapters eight and nine examine the ideological structure of political competition in the EP, with the former focusing on coalition formation and the latter on the dimensionality of the policy space that is evident in voting behaviour. The final two chapters provide detailed and rich case studies of recent controversial and high-stake votes, the 'sacking' of the Santer Commission and the takeover directive, to complement the analysis in chapters four to nine. One could dwell in detail on the many merits of this fine book, but the achievements of the authors will be obvious to any reader and summarizing them thus seems redundant. Therefore it is more productive to explore in the remainder of this forum piece some of the analytical issues this book raises and the questions and challenges it poses for legislative scholars and students of the EP in particular.

Roll call votes

The study of legislative behaviour in Congress has relied heavily on the analyses of roll call votes (RCVs) and the influence of this body of scholarship is evident throughout this book. It is not too radical to claim that the study of legislative behaviour has been transformed in the past two decades by these analytical techniques. Legislative voting records clearly provide very important information about legislative behaviour, voting cohesiveness and perhaps, though more controversially, ideological preferences. Democratic Politics in the European Parliament represents the culmination of an ambitious and formidable data-collection exercise in this tradition. By collecting all roll call votes in the European Parliament since 1979 the authors have made an extremely valuable contribution to legislative and EU studies. Already the data set is being widely used by scholars around the world to various ends. Our understanding of legislative behaviour in the EP has been and will continue to be greatly enhanced by the application to this setting of the technical tools developed for Congress. But roll call votes also have limitations and future scholars who make use of this rich data set must be aware of, acknowledge and correct for the problems associated with their use.

Unlike the US experience, not all votes in the EP are by roll call and this generates significant questions about the representative characteristics of the samples we observe. Currently roll calls number around one-third of all votes, and we still know too little about the process by which roll calls are generated to conclude that this is a random sample from the universe of all votes. Roll calls in the EP may be corrupted by strategic considerations, which will affect the inferences we can draw from them. Indeed, even where all votes are recorded by roll call, the range of vote choices and therefore outcomes will be limited by the influence of pre-floor stages of legislative preparation as well as by decisions regarding the floor agenda [START_REF] Lawrence | Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting[END_REF]. Thus, even where members have permission to vote according to their conscience during plenary sessions, parties (particularly those with a majority) may constrain members' voting behaviour by controlling the legislative agenda. This issue aside, the more pressing and challenging difficulty with the use of RCVs in the EP is that the majority of votes go unrecorded. Hix et al. (2007: 30) hold that it is not unreasonable to assume that roll call votes are requested on the most important issues in the EP. But preliminary research [START_REF] Carrubba | Off the Record: Unrecorded Legislative Votes, Selection Bias and Roll-Call Vote Analysis[END_REF] on votes in the fifth Parliament (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004) suggest that roll calls are disproportionately called on resolutions rather than under the co-decision procedure. Thus, legislatively consequential votes are under-sampled, which may run counter to the argument that roll calls are called on the most important votes. If the assumption of importance is weakened, does this affect the inferences we draw? How might this overrepresentation of votes on non-legislative issues affect our confidence in cohesion indices or NOMINATE scores? With regard to cohesion, the direction of bias introduced by the over-sampling of non-legislative votes is not by any means obvious. On the one hand, this underrepresentation of legislative votes in the roll call sample may bias the levels of cohesion downwards. If most roll call votes are of little legislative consequence, do political groups bother expending limited resources on whipping party members into line? On the other hand, as the authors demonstrate in chapter four, attendance at roll call votes goes up with the legislative importance of the vote. Is it the case that only the most loyal, career-minded MEPs turn up for votes on resolutions? This may have the effect of inflating the actual levels of cohesion of political groups in the EP, if such votes are over-sampled. Yet another possibility is that the lower turnout on resolutions reflects the fact that only those truly interested turn up, and that the subset of votes thus reflects the interests of preference outliers. We do not know the answers to such questions; it may very well be that attendance rates or legislative significance are not related systematically to levels of cohesion. The countervailing dynamics that potentially exist here suggest some interesting questions that future analysts mining this data set will need to consider.

The authors further document that the number of roll calls has increased dramatically over time, which may in part diminish the importance of the above questions; as the number of votes increases, their representative nature is likely to improve. But do these varying levels of roll calls give rise to additional concerns about cross-parliamentary comparisons? There were fewer than 900 roll calls in the first Parliament (1979-84), compared with over 5000 in the fifth (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004). Can we have the same confidence in the results drawn from the much smaller samples in the early Parliaments as we do in those from the fourth and fifth Parliaments?

A more general shortcoming of the NOMINATE procedure is that it does not typically provide uncertainty estimates (such as standard errors and confidence intervals). This may lead to a false sense of precision for those who use the scores. 1 A particular problem that does not seem to be of concern in the congressional literature but may be more relevant in the European Parliament context is the large variation in member participation rates in roll calls. In a given Parliament, some MEPs vote thousands of times whereas others vote a mere handful of times. This reflects high absentee rates, comparatively large turnover rates in membership between elections and, more worryingly perhaps, strategic absences (not to be confused with official abstentions). For instance, in the current Parliament many of the new members from East European countries have particularly poor voting records. We can obtain NOMINATE scores with as few as 20 votes, but it is problematic if one MEP's scores are calculated with 1600 votes and the scores of another with only 40 when no uncertainty estimates are generated.

To interpret the scores that are generated by NOMINATE as preference measures is common practice in congressional work, primarily because it is one measure of something unobservable that lies at the heart of much of what we, as political scientists, are interested in. The authors of this book largely, and judiciously, shy away from this particular interpretation in the context of the EP, though the data they have generated may unwisely be utilized to this end by others. The argument sustained throughout this book very much indicates that these are not party-free measures of preferences and should not be used as proxies for ideology. Nevertheless, preferences need to be approximated if we are to test theories of legislative decision-making or address questions about whether or not key parliamentary bodies such as committees are representative agents of their principal (Parliament). Alternative measures such as elite surveys suffer from serious sample response issues, and even this aside there is no actual obligation on those who respond to be truthful. Measures based on constituency characteristics , which have proved popular in the USA, are also problematic given the very vague notion of constituency in the EP. One final possibility is to make use of the recent interest group ratings from organizations such as Friends of the Earth, though again these suffer from small sample size issues and may exaggerate extremism and bipolarity [START_REF] Snyder | Artificial Extremism in Interest Group Ratings[END_REF]. There is clearly no silver bullet solution to the preference measurement problem that legislative scholars confront, but crossvalidation of the various measures is recommended.

Similarly, testing spatial models of legislative behaviour fundamentally depends on our ability to accurately gauge the number and nature of the political dimensions on which parties compete. The authors' analysis of roll call voting in chapter nine demonstrates that there are broadly two dimensions on which the political groups compete and that these dimensions have been relatively stable over time. The first dimension fairly conclusively maps a general left-right policy dimension, which lends weight to the overall argument that party competition is defined ideologically rather than territorially. But the second dimension, the authors readily admit, is more difficult to interpret substantively. It may represent some European-level government-opposition dynamics and/or a pro-EU integration versus anti-EU integration dimension. The interpretation of dimensions relies primarily on a researcher's substantive knowledge but may be complicated in the case of the EP if selection biases are evident in roll call votes. Again the question of the representativeness of roll calls is fundamental here. If RCVs are not representative by issue area, this may affect the conclusions we draw about the nature of the policy space. If roll calls are called disproportionately in certain policy domains, this may lead to the overemphasis of particular dimensions of conflict in NOMINATE-type analysis. [START_REF] Carrubba | Off the Record: Unrecorded Legislative Votes, Selection Bias and Roll-Call Vote Analysis[END_REF] suggest that a degree of caution is required in the interpretation of and generalization from roll calls in the European Parliament. Overall, their work finds evidence for pooling concerns, the asymmetric use of roll calls under different legislative procedures and the calling of RCVs disproportionately by particular political groups (notably the Greens) and in particular issue areas. More work on disaggregated votes may lead to interesting findings; pooling RCVs on co-decisions with those on resolutions may not be ideal without first knowing for certain that they are generated by the same processes and whether they experience the same degree of whipping. None of this is to argue that the use of roll calls should be abandoned but rather their use necessitates explicit consideration of the process by which roll calls are produced. In addition, disaggregating votes by issue area might prove a fruitful exercise: for instance, does the subsample of votes on environmental issues lead to a clear green policy dimension emerging? More work on comparing the sample of roll calls to the universe of actual (and indeed potential) votes would greatly enhance our confidence in the inferences we draw. Overall these issues suggest that the analysis of roll call votes has much potential. There is clearly scope for further development of roll call analyses through the use of more sophisticated techniques such as Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) modelling, which also generates uncertainty estimates. In conclusion, the contribution of [START_REF] Hix | Democratic Politics in the European Parliament[END_REF] via the data set, which accompanies the book, cannot be overestimated.

Moving beyond the floor

Despite the particular issues that arise with the use of RCVs in the EP, it is convincingly demonstrated over the course of this book that the political groups in the European Parliament have become increasingly cohesive over time. A crucial question that the work thus motivates is how such unity is created. Political parties in established democracies typically exhibit such high levels of cohesion that the question of how such discipline has arisen has, until recently, received little attention [START_REF] Bowler | Party Cohesion, Party Discipline and Parliaments[END_REF]. In emerging legislatures, however, the process of transforming rudimentary party organizations into disciplined parties is not inevitable. What mechanisms are used to achieve this end? How party discipline arises and how it is maintained are central questions of interest in legislative studies. Our knowledge of these topics, however, suffers from substantial gaps, especially with regard to the practice of party discipline outside the relatively familiar Anglo-American setting.

If we are fully to disentangle the concepts of ideological affinity and party discipline, we need to look beyond the voting behaviour of MEPs. A party that is cohesive because of an affinity of ideological viewpoints and a party that is cohesive because its members are whipped into line are observationally equivalent when one restricts one's analysis solely to floor voting. [START_REF] Krehbiel | Where's the Party?[END_REF] has put the argument for affinity mostly forcefully, arguing that parties merely reflect their members' preferences; they provide neither structure nor constraint. He posits that legislative outcomes (via voting) are not the product of parliamentary party discipline but rather reflect the distribution of preferences of the party's members.

The challenge of creating cohesive political parties is not trivial in the European Parliament. The literature on party discipline tends to focus on electoral incentives as a means of inducing party loyalty, but the European Parliament provides a particularly interesting case study because these inducements are very weak, if not entirely missing. To the extent that electoral incentives shape much of the behaviour of political actors, the political groups in the European Parliament are clearly greatly disadvantaged when compared with their national counterparts. They do not control access to the electoral ballot, they do not have resources to finance election campaigns and, additionally, MEPs need not fear that rebellious behaviour will force early elections. Although the prospects for cohesion appear quite bleak, the book by [START_REF] Hix | Democratic Politics in the European Parliament[END_REF] demonstrates quite persuasively that this has not been the experience of the political groups in the EP. Given the highly constrained environment in which the political groups operate, how can we account for the rise in political group cohesion? The findings of this book motivate many questions that perhaps can be answered only by closer examination of the activities of MEPs both within their political groups and within the committee system.

A system of credible sanctions and rewards is one means of resolving the collective dilemmas that all parties face. Do these sanctions and rewards exist internally to the EP and are they systematically used to punish and reward party defectors and loyalists? It is almost certainly the case that intraparliamentary incentives to encourage cohesion operate in all legislative bodies, but often these are overshadowed by electoral considerations. The study of party discipline in the European Parliament allows legislative scholars more neatly to isolate the internal and electoral factors in an actor's motivation structure, with implications for the general study of legislative behaviour. The European Parliament offers scholars a particularly good case study for demonstrating the importance of internal advancement in a political actor's motivations, because it is one of the few contexts in which the electoral connection is not clearly dominant. One obvious avenue of research is to examine whether or not those who vote against the party are sanctioned via the loss of valuable offices within the Parliament or the political group structure. Does the committee system, for instance, provide the political groups with an important source of patronage, in addition to acting as a source of policy expertise? As is the case with the US Congress, and increasingly with a wide variety of legislatures across the world, committees are the lifeblood of the European Parliament. The political groups have played a crucial and very deliberate role in the organization of parliamentary committees from the outset. In particular, the committee assignment process is controlled by political groups rather than through a seniority-type norm as in the US Congress. In addition, there is a clear hierarchy of committees, with committee prestige largely determined by the degree of legislative powers the EP has in a given policy jurisdiction. Positions on these high-status committees are very much sought after by ambitious MEPs. This hierarchy of prestige and control of the assignment process grants the party leaders some power vis-à-vis individual MEPs. Not only has the committee system expanded to provide 'jobs for the boys', but control over the committee assignment process and committee chairs has been strongly tightened over the years. In general, the career trajectories of MEPs and how these relate to their behaviour on the floor (if at all) offers some wonderful research opportunities for future legislative scholars. How do MEPs' career expectations influence their legislative behaviour and, in turn, how does this behaviour impact on their future career trajectories?

On a related note, the question of who controls the MEPs -national parties or political groups -is addressed in chapter seven. The evidence here suggests that members vote with their political group most of the time, but there is also evidence of voting against the political group in favour of a member's national delegation when the two do not coincide. On a minor statistical note, it is worth considering that in any group versus subgroup comparison one is 'virtually guaranteed to find that subgroups are more cohesive than groups' (Desposato, 2003: 281), especially when subgroups are small, as is the case with many national delegations. The overall result that national parties are MEPs' principal is a little disquieting because it suggests that political groups are not as fully institutionalized or as powerful as cohesion scores taken at face value might indicate. Interesting questions arise about the nature of the relationship between national parties and their parent political groups. Is the political group more than the sum of its national parties? Are some national parties more privileged than others in the political group structure, perhaps as a function of size? Can fully institutionalized national political parties be conceived of as similar to factions within the supranational political group? One obvious question that needs to be addressed further is whether or not national delegations are given exemptions by their political group on certain votes. This may occur for instance when matters of national importance are at stake and/or the national party's vote does not affect the overall success or failure of the ballot. Overall, the results in this chapter motivate some fascinating questions about what happens when there is incongruence between the policy positions of national delegations and those of the political group.

Agenda control

Chapter six of the book examines the impact of agenda-setting powers on cohesion levels but finds little evidence to support this hypothesis. The authors conclude that 'parties in the European Parliament have only a limited opportunity to use their agenda setting powers to control the voting behaviour of their backbench members' (Hix et al., 2007: 130). Part of the problem with this type of proposition and analysis is the great difficulty of capturing and measuring the concept of agenda control in cross-sectional statistical models. Given the proportional norms that govern procedural matters inside the EP, the effect of agenda-setting powers will be conditional on party size, though clearly the two issues are conceptually distinct. The results in chapter six are on the whole weak, the explained variance of the models, despite the inclusion of upwards of 20 variables, ranges between 1% and 4%. These models are clearly not explaining a great deal, even though some individual coefficients are significant. The question arises of whether or not the measures utilized are really capturing agenda-setting powers. Do we reject the hypothesis that agendasetting powers are not very important in explaining cohesion levels in the EP, or do we accept the ancillary hypothesis that the measures for such complex concepts as agenda-setting are imprecise? Measurement is the challenge for future scholars, and perhaps a complementary approach that examines the historical struggles over agenda-setting powers within the Parliament would be worth pursuing. In addition, recent work by [START_REF] Schneider | Evidence with Insight: What Models Contribute to EU Research[END_REF] highlights the need for better models of EU decision-making in general, particularly models that incorporate the consensual norms that are the hallmark of EU politics.

Empirical research into battles over the organization of the Parliament and the evolution of the rules of procedure has been surprisingly limited and mostly anecdotal to date. Apart from work by [START_REF] Williams | The European Parliament: Political Groups, Minority Rights and the Rationalisations of Parliamentary Organisation. A Research Note[END_REF] and [START_REF] Kreppel | The European Parliament and Supranational Party System: A Study in Institutional Development[END_REF], there is little critical analysis of the internal evolution of the Parliament. 2 In the period 1979-2007 considerably more than 1000 rule changes were proposed by the various Rules Committees. The volume of procedural proposals is noteworthy; a great deal of parliamentary time has been dedicated to structuring the institution. The formal rules of the legislative game inside the European Parliament have been highly contested over the course of the past 30 years, which would indicate that agenda-setting powers are not perceived as irrelevant by the main actors. Procedural matters may not be of pressing concern in legislatures that possess a large and disciplined majority [START_REF] Binder | Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress[END_REF], but where such conditions are absent, as in the EP, legislative rules become important tools for actors who wish to build and sustain stable and cohesive parties. The history of the European Parliament is marked by lengthy battles over what appear to be organizational minutiae. The amount of effort and parliamentary time devoted to changing rules does not accord with a non-partisan account of procedural choice. As Willi Rothley commented in plenary in 1993, '[t]he Rules of Procedure are Parliament's Constitution. Matters affecting the Rules of Procedure are therefore always political matters' (14 March 1993). In addition, the timing of many changes does not accord with changes in the external environment. The debates in Parliament reveal that the two largest parties -the European People's Party (EPP) and the Party of the European Socialists (PES) -have frequently acted in concert to shape the rules to their collective benefit.

Interpreting rule change and rule evolution can be a difficult and subjective exercise because rule changes are open to multiple interpretations. What type of evidence would be convincing corroboration of purposive and intentional action on the part of the political groups in the EP to promote cohesion? Is a rule that limits the speaking rights of individual members simply an attempt to use a limited parliamentary schedule more efficiently, or does it signal an attempt to reduce the rights of individual parliamentarians? Most rule changes will appear technical and of minor consequence even if intended for some more partisan purpose; it is in the interests of the proposer to cloak them in neutral language. In addition, it is possible that rules that may have profound partisan consequences down the line may not actually have been originally intended for this purpose. One method of overcoming the problems inherent in interpreting rules is to examine the debates that surrounded their introduction. Were they perceived to be only technical by the key actors involved? The debates of the European Parliament have not been subject to significant analyses and they are an unmined treasure trove for those interested in the historical evolution of the institution.

The debates on the general revision of the Rules of Procedure in the first directly elected Parliament provide an illustrative example of the potential for this alternative and complementary approach to the vexing question of agenda powers. Much of the debate hinged on the rights of big groups versus small groups, but it was also asserted that the proposed revisions aimed to quell dissent within the large political groups themselves. Mario Capanna, speaking on behalf of the Communists declared that, This idiotic policy with regard to the Rules of Procedure has a very specific object in view, namely to reduce the areas of dissent within Parliament. And I mean dissent not only among the minority groups but also within the majority groups whether of the right, centre-right or even, occasionally, the left. 3 Else Hammerick, of the small left-wing Rainbow coalition (ARC), reiterated this point when she complained about the new proposal to limit explanations of the vote. She argued that not only would this proposal serve to strengthen the large political groups vis-à-vis the small ones but it would also serve to weaken dissenting party members within the large parties.

In future only one representative of each group would be allowed an explanation of vote before voting took place. Only one from each group, that would substantially strengthen the position of the supranational political groups with their pecking orders and hierarchies, and correspondingly weaken those who do not share the group's majority views and weaken national minorities within them. In the past explanations of vote gave these minorities a chance to speak. 4 The manner and means by which elected representatives attempt to get their own preferences aired vary from legislature to legislature, but they broadly fall into two categories: the right to table questions and the right to place amendments on the parliamentary agenda. Major revisions of the rules undertaken since 1979 have effectively removed many of these privileges from individual members. For instance, the right to table amendments in Parliament, the right to refer a report back to committee, the right to call for an adjournment of debate and the right to call for a debate on a matter of urgency have all been revoked from individual MEPs. Such rights now rest with political groups or 40 members acting in concert. With the passage of these revisions, individual members have been emasculated. Speaking time has also been drastically reduced over the years. In April 1979 there was no limitation, for example, on the length of time a member could devote to an 'explanation of the vote'; by 2007 this right had been severely circumscribed such that a member 'may give an oral explanation on the final vote for not longer than one minute' (European Parliament, 2007: 163). Rule 142 further dictates that 'No Member may speak for more than one minute on any of the following: the minutes, procedural motions, amendments to the final draft agenda or to the agenda'. These policies not only stifle independent members but also serve to stifle dissent within the larger groups.

The EP's limits on individual rights are among the most restrictive in Europe. Individual legislators do not possess significant speaking rights or adjournment rights in the EP, and what rights they did have, have been severely circumscribed over the course of the past 25 years. Over the years, political groups have become the gatekeepers of legislative amendments and of most interruptive and procedural motions in the EP, and even a preliminary analysis of the debates on this matter suggest that the two largest political groups consciously undertook these rule changes. Before we dismiss the role of agenda-setting powers in creating political group cohesion we should examine rule evolution in this institution in greater detail.

A dynamic party system

Parties form, fail, merge and divide on a staggering basis in the EP. Simply keeping track of which MEPs are in which political groups and which national parties are affiliated with which of the supranational groups is no mean feat. It is generally the case that in the literature on political parties far too little attention is paid 'to the evolution of party systems between elections' [START_REF] Laver | The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections[END_REF]. The authors of this book argue that there are 'six main political "families" which have remained relatively consistent across all six elected parliaments' (Hix et al., 2007: 23) and they identify these as social democrat, centre-right, liberal, radical left, green and anti-European. This is not a controversial claim, but the use of six party 'families' as the basic unit of analysis in parts of the book may not capture the full extent of dynamism that exists in the EP. This dynamism in party group formation is also of interest to the very question of cohesion. Party families do not whip members into line and this choice of analytical unit may depress the cohesion scores for the smaller political groups, which appear at times to have been merged by the authors into one family. As the authors openly acknowledge, the radical left comprised several different political groups until well into the third Parliament. Even excluding independents, there were 10 separate political groups in the EP for most of the third legislative session, not six. The number of political groups in the EP varies over time and only the three main political groups can be thought of as party families in the traditional sense for most of the history of the directly elected parliament.

As a general explanatory variable, party family has shortcomings when it comes to explaining the dynamic nature of political groups in the EP. Although capturing the broad spirit of the ideological basis on which party groupings originally formed, the party family explanation inadequately explains national party affiliation with EP party groups. First, party family is an essentially static characterization, based on long-standing, 'essential and indelible' (Klingemann et al., 1994: 24) issue associations and positions, whereas national parties frequently and regularly switch EP party groups. Second, many national parties do not belong to clearly definable party families, either because their organizational basis does not correspond to the classic cleavages or because they are formed primarily around new (single) issues such as Europe or immigration. This situation characterizes many of the parties from the eight post-communist member states.

A general problem with the concept of party family as an operational variable is that, despite its wide use, the classification of party family remains underspecified. Even after years of research, there exists no golden index of party family affiliations. This problem is exacerbated when one attempts to extend the concept of party family beyond its West European base. For instance, there are large numbers of parties in Eastern Europe that cannot easily be classified in terms of party families because they do not share either an ideological heritage or associational links with their West European counterparts. Even advocates of the party family approach and experts in the politics of Eastern Europe cannot place these political parties definitively into party families. For instance, [START_REF] Taggart | Contemporary Euroscepticism in the Party Systems of the European Union Candidate States of Central and Eastern Europe[END_REF] place many parties such as the Czech Civic Democratic Party, the Slovak Christian Democratic Movement and the Polish Union of Real Politics into both the Liberal and Conservative party family in their study. There is much disagreement on what even constitutes a party family. For example, do agrarian and centre parties form one party family or two party families? Nonetheless, the association between party family and policies towards European integration has been used to conclude that political contestation in the European arena is largely driven by cleavage patterns [START_REF] Marks | The Past in the Present: A Theory of Party Response to European Integration[END_REF][START_REF] Marks | National Political Parties and European Integration[END_REF].

The dynamics and evolution of the party system within the EP offer a fruitful avenue of research for party scholars. In terms of party cohesion, this dynamism offers interesting possibilities. Are national parties or MEPs who fail to toe the political group line forced to leave the party, or do they voluntarily jump ship? Do legislators alter their voting behaviour as a consequence of changing party affiliation? If they fail to do so, we may have evidence of partyless voting behaviour and perhaps have more confidence in the use of NOMINATE scores as ideological proxies. If, however, we witness change this may be further evidence of party discipline. If legislators switch from a more to a less disciplined party (or vice versa) and thus become subject to shifting degrees of party instruction across roll calls, the matter becomes even more complex [START_REF] Rosenthal | Analyzing Roll Calls with Perfect Spatial Voting: France 1946-1958[END_REF]. In future work one could address these issues by dividing up the voting records of party-switchers and estimating separate ideal points for the two parties they have affiliated with in the course of a single legislative session.

Conclusion

These are exciting times for EP scholars. Better data and analytical tools have become available in recent years that allow for much more systematic analysis of legislative behaviour. In Democratic Politics in the European Parliament, Hix, Noury and Roland ask many fundamental questions about the nature of legislative organization in the European Parliament and provide many answers. Perhaps even more importantly, this book challenges and motivates a whole host of new puzzles, in the finest traditions of scientific research, and deserves a very wide readership.

On a final note, this book has fulfilled its mission to connect research on the European Parliament to the general study of legislative behaviour and institutions in political science. The true promise and potential of EU scholarship is that it provides a testing ground for extant theories of legislative behaviour, reinforcing what we already know and offering the possibility of falsification and, most importantly, the opportunity to broaden the trends in legislative studies in general. It is remarkable that our understanding of legislative politics is largely dictated by the experience of the US House of Representatives. The similarities with the EP make for relatively easy comparison, but it is perhaps the differences, such as the lack of an electoral connection, that will be most instructive. How such differences influence actors' incentive structures and motivations and, as a consequence, their behaviour and decision outcomes may fundamentally affect our very understanding of legislative politics.

Notes

This Forum article was commissioned by Gerald Schneider in the Autumn of 2006 and all editorial work was undertaken by Matthew Gabel.

1 Though not normally provided by the standard NOMINATE package, confidence intervals can be produced for NOMINATE scores; see [START_REF] Lewis | Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap[END_REF]. 2 For similar work on the Council of Ministers, see [START_REF] Carrubba | Explaining Institutional Change in the European Union: What Determines the Voting Rule in the Council of Ministers?[END_REF].

For an account of procedural choice and rule evolution across the European Union as a whole, see [START_REF] Jupille | Procedural Politics: Issues, Influence, and Institutional Choice in the European Union[END_REF]

  . 3 Debates of the European Parliament, 8 July 1980. 4 Debates of the European Parliament, 26 March 1981.

McElroy Legislative Politics as Normal?

European Union Politics 8(3)

About the author

Gail McElroy is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Trinity College, 2-3 College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland. Fax: +353 1 677 0546 E-mail: mcelroy@tcd.ie