The presentation is based on a new paper entitled Patterns of roll-call vote requests in the European Parliament. The paper is a part of the Research Council Norway funded StREP project. The abstract reads as follow:
Studies of roll-call votes provide us with a unique insight into
individual-level legislative behaviour in EU politics. However, critiques
warn against generalizing from roll-calls because they are requested
strategically, for example, to signal a policy position or to enforce
party group cohesion. What are the patterns of roll-call vote requests
and do they suggest strategic behaviour? To address this question, we
leverage newly collected data on all roll-call vote requests in the
European Parliament for the last two-and-a-half legislatures, from 2009
until today. We sketch the patterns of roll-call requests over time,
across procedures, policy areas, and actors to evaluate the degree of
(un)representativeness of roll-call votes along these dimensions. We
contribute to a rich literature on legislative behaviour in the European
Union that is based on roll-call voting and that assumes that roll-calls
are a representative sample of all voting in the European Parliament. In
addition, we add to the scholarly debate on the representativeness of
roll-call votes with a more comprehensive large-scale study than has
been carried out on EP legislation to date.