Party group collapse and strategic switching in the European Parliament
| Author | Aaron R Martin |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116521999718 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Party group collapse and
strategic switching in the
European Parliament
Aaron R Martin
Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU,
Munich, Germany
Abstract
The literature on party group switching in the European Parliament contends that
members re-affiliate primarily for strategic reasons. This article advances the discussion
by also considering the occurrence of non-strategic switches which follow the collapse
of weakly institutionalized groups. Using an original dataset which includes DW-
Nominate scores (1979–2009), I operationalize policy-seeking behavior among strate-
gic switchers by deriving member- and delegation-to-group policy distance variables.
The pooled logistic regression models using a penalized maximum likelihood estimator
make it possible to address quasicomplete separation, and the results show that mem-
bers from large groups and delegations have significantly lower odds of switching.
Further, as members or delegations become incongruent with their group, the odds
of switching increase. The study has important implications for research investigating
the relationship between weak party institutionalization and parliamentary behavior.
Keywords
European Parliament, institutionalization, party collapse, party switching, separation
Introduction
On 26 November 2007, Sajjad Karim, a member of the European Parliament
(MEP) from the United Kingdom (UK), announced that he would be leaving
Corresponding author:
Aaron R Martin, Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538
Munich, Germany.
Email: aaron.martin@gsi.uni
European Union Politics
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116521999718
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2021, Vol. 22(3) 521–544
both the Liberal Democrats and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for
Europe, to sit under the Conservative whip as a newly affiliated member of the
Tory delegation in the European People’s Party and European Democrats (EPP–
ED). Citing David Cameron’s speech on immigration reform as the reason for
switching parties (Conservative Home Blog: Tory Diary, 2007a), observers imme-
diately began speculating about whether the Conservatives would reward Karim
with favorable ballot positioning in the upcoming election (Conservative Home
Blog: Tory Diary, 2007b). On 14 November 2007, less than a year after it was
formed, an internal dispute triggered the collapse of the Identity, Tradition,
Sovereignty (ITS) technical group which in turn led all 18 members to switch
into the non-inscrits (NI). This was not the first time many of these ITS members
had faced the collapse of a group, however. Five incumbents also experienced the
dissolution of the Technical Group of Independent Members (TDI) during the
previous term. In fact, over the course of their combined EP careers, former-ITS
members account for 47 total changes in group affiliation. These events exemplify
instances of party group switching in the European Parliament (EP), but how
similar are they?
The study of party switching is an established field of research (Heller and
Mershon, 2009), incorporating both analyses of individual parliaments
(Desposato, 2006; Heller and Mershon, 2008; Yoshinaka, 2015), as well as compar-
ative, cross-national studies (Mershon and Shvetsova, 2013; O’Brien and Shomer,
2013; Volpi, 2019). This literature identifies several types of switching. Disloyal
individuals ‘hop’ from one party to another, while collective switches take place
when groups of politicians make the strategic decision to leave their home party
and establish a new organization. Fission describes factions from a single party
splitting to create two or more new parties; fusion occurs when multiple parties
merge to form a new entity; and start-ups result when members of parliament
from multiple parties combine to form a new one (Kreuzer and Pettai, 2009).
These types of collective switches share a focus on outcomes, i.e. how new parties
emerge from old ones. Conversely, this article identifies party group collapse as a
triggering event which causes non-strategic, collective switches in the EP.
The party switching literature focuses primarily on goal-oriented parliamentar-
ians, like Karim, who swapparty labels in order to gain political benefits(Heller and
Mershon, 2009). This perspective is also dominant in studies of EP party group
switching, where the unit of analysis is either individuals or national party delega-
tions (NPDs), and switchers pursue either ‘power’ or ‘ideology’ (Hix and Noury,
2018). In the EP, however, party group collapse, as observed in the TDI and ITS
cases, explains an extraordinary number of switches. During the first six sessions,
473 members changed group labels, and of those, 270 switches followed directly
from the disintegration of 18 European political groups (EPGs).
Over 10% of members changed group labels during the first seven EP terms
(Hix and Noury, 2018: 558), which makes this an interesting case because, when
compared to national parliaments, only Brazil and Italy have consistently higher
frequencies of switching (Heller and Mershon, 2005; O’Brien and Shomer, 2013).
522 European Union Politics 22(3)
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