Within-Term Volatility in the EP
by Shawna K. Metzger
shawnakmetzger.com/wp/projects/epdurat/
Accessed April 19, 2024. Last modified February 10, 2019
“Determinants of Membership Volatility in the European Parliament, 1979-2014” (with William T. Daniel) – 2018, Journal of Legislative Studies {paper abstract}
In this project, I combine my methodological interests in duration analysis with William T. Daniel’s substantive interests regarding career behavior of Members of European Parliament. Extant literature on legislator volatility has addressed the causes and implications of membership turnover at some length—suggesting broad-reaching conclusions for how institutional design choices impact the quality of democracy in diverse, cross-national contexts. However, these analyses typically treat such volatility as the degree of membership turnover between, as opposed to within, legislative periods. To address this lacuna, we examine the determinants of membership change in the European Parliament (EP) during waves of the legislature. As one of the largest democratic legislatures in the world, the EP’s membership is also among the most volatile, losing roughly half of its members between terms. However, as a supranational legislature, the EP is also particularly susceptible to turnover during a term, as roughly 10 percent of MEPs serve only partial terms—oftentimes as a direct consequence of their national political aspirations.
We use duration models to examine the determinants of early exit for all members of the EP, 1979-2014, and compare this with sources of turnover between legislative periods. We make use of my coauthored work with Jones regarding interpreting duration models with probabilities. The notable diversity present in the national political and electoral institutions of the 28 member states electing MEPs allows us to maximize purchase over both cross-national and temporal sources of variation found in the EP. Our findings indicate that variation present in the national institutions of EU countries has strong bearing on the extent to which within-term volatility exists in the EP, contributing both to our specific understanding of volatility in this important legislative body, as well as our appreciation for the connection between national and European political systems more generally.