Party or Party Group? : A Qualitative Interview Study of the Voting Behavior of Swedish Membersof the European Parliament

Abstract: One fundamental condition for a democracy to work is the possibility for voters to hold their legislators to account. Because voter turnout in European Parliament (EP) elections is so low, however, the task of holding MEPs accountable is passed on to the national parties. These become ‘transmission belts’ between voters and legislators: they instruct the MEPs how to vote and present them threats and rewards to ensure they vote as promised. To study how well this works, this thesis aims at exploring what influences how an MEP votes in situations where the national party and the European Party Group (EPG) hold conflicting policy positions. A new analytical framework is built to generate and preliminarily test hypotheses concerning what influences how an MEP votes. The analytical framework is largely inspired by Strøm (1990), who assumes that legislators are driven by their wishes of getting policy through, reaching high office and being re-elected. Normally, these goals can be reached with the help of the legislator’s party, which is why legislators have an incentive to keep their party happy and vote according to its policy position. In the EP, however, things are complicated by the fact that certain goals can only be reached with the help of legislators’ EPGs. Hypotheses concerning what may drive MEPs to vote either with her national party or with her EPG are tested in the thesis with the help of unique interview data, collected from five Swedish MEPs from parties in government. The thesis’ results show that policy-related incentives are most important to MEPs, and that these incentives are mainly controlled by EPGs. Office- and re-election-related incentives are only ascribed limited importance. There are contextual factors that affect these results: if an issue is perceived as important to Sweden or to the national party or if it receives high media attention, MEPs ascribe less importance to EPG-controlled incentives, although this does not mean that national party-controlled incentives increase in importance. In conclusion, MEPs do not seem to feel pressured by their national parties when deciding how to vote. This leads me to the conclusion that the role of national parties as ‘transmission belts’ between voters and MEPs is defective