Who gets committee leadership positions in the European Parliament? Evidence from the 2014 selection process
| Author | Bernd Schlipphak,Oliver Treib |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116518824029 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Who gets committee
leadership positions
in the European
Parliament? Evidence
from the 2014
selection process
Oliver Treib
University of Mu¨nster, Germany
Bernd Schlipphak
University of Mu¨nster, Germany
Abstract
What are the driving forces behind the selection of individual Members of the European
Parliament for committee leadership positions? To shed more light on this process, the
article analyses an original dataset comprising biographical and behavioural information
on all 751 Members of the European Parliament who assumed office in 2014. We show
that the choice of committee chairs and vice-chairs is not determined by loyalty to
party groups or national delegations. Instead, we demonstrate that Members of the
European Parliament’ career ambitions and their ability to demonstrate relevant expe-
rience play a key role. These findings have important implications for our understanding
of the power of national parties and European party groups and for the emerging
literature on political career patterns at the European level.
Keywords
Ambition theory, committee chair, European Parliament, legislative careers
Corresponding author:
Oliver Treib, Department of Political Science, University of Mu¨nster, Scharnhorststr. 100, 48151 Mu¨nster,
Germany.
Email: oliver.treib@uni-muenster.de
European Union Politics
2019, Vol. 20(2) 219–238
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116518824029
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Introduction
As the European Parliament (EP) has acquired more and more legislative and
budgetary powers, research on European Union (EU) politics has become increas-
ingly interested in how the EP is organised internally. Scholars have analysed the
role of party groups in EP voting (Hix et al., 2005; Kreppel, 2002; Raunio, 1997;
Ringe, 2010), committee membership (McElroy, 2006; Whitaker, 2001, 2011: 59–
90), the appointment of rapporteurs (Daniel, 2015: 77–106; Hausemer, 2006;
Høyland, 2006; Kaeding, 2004; Yordanova, 2013: 61–84; Yoshinaka et al.,
2010), and the selection of group coordinators (Daniel and Thierse, 2018).
This research has accumulated a considerable body of knowledge on how the
work of the individual Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) is organised
and co-ordinated. However, comparatively little attention has been paid so far to
the appointment of committee chairs and vice-chairs. While there are several
descriptions of the formal and informal rules guiding the appointment of commit-
tee chairs (Corbett et al., 2016: 171–175; Mamadouh and Raunio, 2003: 339–341),
there have been, to the best of our knowledge, only two systematic studies on the
selection of committee chairs and vice-chairs (Bowler and Farrell, 1995; Whitaker,
2011: 91–105).
This relative neglect of research on committee leadership positions is surprising.
Like the United States (US) Congress, the EP is a ‘transformative legislature’
(Polsby, 1975), which means that a large share of the parliament’s work is devoted
to scrutinising and revising legislative proposals. This work is primarily done in the
EP’s committees. The legislative decisions of the EP are thus strongly predeter-
mined by committee deliberations. The chairs and vice-chairs of the EP’s commit-
tees play an important role in setting the agenda and organising the work of the
parliament’s committees (Corbett et al., 2016: 171).
As a consequence, committee chairs belong to the most attractive positions
within the EP. In the 2010 MEP survey administered by the European
Parliament Research Group (Hix et al., 2016), MEPs were asked about the most
attractive among four different parliamentary positions: president of the EP, com-
mittee chair, European party group leader, and national delegation leader. 33.3%
of those who answered the question said the most attractive position was commit-
tee chair, followed by EP president (28.9%), national delegation leader (20.7%)
and European party group leader (20.6%).
This article sheds new light on the appointment of committee chairs and vice-
chairs. In order to explain the selection of committee leadership positions at the
beginning of the eighth term, we analyse an original dataset comprising all 751
MEPs who assumed office in 2014. Besides information on positions of committee
chairs and vice-chairs, the dataset contains variables measuring a number of key
behavioural and biographical characteristics of MEPs that can be used to explain
the selection of committee leadership positions.
The data are more recent than the information used by the two previous studies,
which addressed committee leadership choices taken at the beginning of the fourth
220 European Union Politics 20(2)
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