Home sweet home: assessing the weight and the effectiveness of national parties’ interference on MEPs’ everyday activity

The paper aims at ex post assessing the weight and the effectiveness of domestic parties’ role in shaping and controlling the voting behaviour of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The empirical analysis addresses the turnover between the 5th and the
6th EP legislatures and focuses on the three major European political families. Provided that, so far, the re-election of MEPs is still an eminently national business, this study
estimates national parties’ attitudes towards behaving according to a ‘sanction-benefit’ mindset, thereby evaluating how MEPs’ careers in the aftermath of the 2004 elections have been influenced by their compliance to national party’s line.

The analysis shows that seven out of the twelve delegations taken into consideration are marked by an evident sanctionary nature. In these delegations, national loyalty emerges as a key factor for a successful future political career both at home and at EP level. Accordingly, it has been found that in the sanctionary cases a recurrent pattern emerges: the former MEPs promoted as national or local representatives emerge as the most nationally-loyal, followed by the re-elected MEPs; whereas the former MEPs retired or excluded from political life emerge as those keener to defect during their past European mandate. When it comes to the five delegations that do not fit the sanctionary model, the recognition of common traits or comparable behavioural patterns proves to be extremely
difficult. Even if identifying the reasons for differences among the delegations goes beyond the scope of this paper, the analysis demonstrates that, given the low statistical
relevance in the five cases, it is possible to rule out the possibility of opposite behavioural patterns in the non-sanctionist delegations.