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Philip Manow / Luca Verzichelli
Tenure and Parliamentary careers in the European Parliament
University of Konstanz/ University of Siena ([email protected]; [email protected]) Paper prepared for the ECPR joint sessions, Helsinki, 2007 1st Draft, May 2007, comments are welcome, do not quote without the permission of the authors
1. Introduction
This paper analyzes careers of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in a long term
perspective. It has two major motivations. First, the study of elite circulation in the European
Parliament (from now on EP) is central for our interpretation of the nature of this supra-national
body, which has been traditionally perceived to be a sui generis legislature, but which recently for
many observers seems to have become a much more familiar, ‘normal’ type of parliament. Second,
MEP’s career patterns allows us analyzing the determinants of parliamentary careers in a
comparative perspective: how much do electoral rules, differences in the parliamentary mandate
(the possibility of a dual mandate, differences in salaries and pension provisions et cetera), or
domestic political opportunity structures explain differences in parliamentary tenure and career?
Our paper therefore speaks to two literatures – to the literature on European integration and on the
political system of the EU (1) and to the electoral studies literature (2).
(1) In the EU-literature it is a widely shared view that the EP has been deeply transformed during
the last twenty-five years, evolving into a complex but important actor in Europe’s political system
(Kreppel 2002; Scully 2003). This, of course, is due to the increase of the EP’s formal powers, an
increase which is likely to have provoked new attitudes and new behaviour among MEPs. The
enhanced powers of the European Parliament may have rendered a truly European political career
much more attractive than it previously was. Recent studies focus particularly on the emergence of
a “familiar party system” within the EP (Hix 2005; Hix, Noury et al. 2005). The EP has more and
more come to be seen as just one example of the “genus” parliament or legislature (Kreppel 2002;
Scully 2003). However, little has been done to understand some important dimensions in this
alleged transformation into a normal parliament, in particular we lack studies about the career
Deleted: Tenure and Parliamentary careers in the European Parliament¶
patterns of MEPs and the establishment of a stabile parliamentary elite within the EP. These
dimensions, however, would warrant special attention, since in these respects the EP still seems to
look quite different from national parliaments. We know that European elections produce a
remarkable high turnover among MEPs, and that turnover in between elections is also quite high in
Europe (Corbett, Jacobs et al. 2003: 40). Therefore, the basic conditions which would finally make
a new European “political network” effective (Corbett 1998) - namely long parliamentary tenure
and a degree of distinctiveness and autonomy of the directly elected supra-national representatives –
seem to be still far from being achieved. In any case, it is still an open question whether a
“satisfactory” rate of consolidation of a political elite within the European representative body has
been already achieved. We therefore contend that an in depth, long term analysis of patterns of
turnover and career among members of the European Parliament could be an important step towards
a better understanding of the current role of the EP within Europe’s political system.
(2) However, and this is our second motivation, the study of the European Parliament can also
combine the advantages of a case study design with a comparative perspective on the determinants
of parliamentary career patterns. In this context we may be more interested in understanding to what
extent the same factors usually invoked to explain parliamentary tenure and career in the
“traditional” national legislatures are also at work in the context of the young European parliament.
Recent studies have re-directed the scholarly attention to the relevance of turnover and career
circulation for the functioning of mature democracies. Hibbing (Hibbing 1999) pointed out that the
classic view of a direct link between “careers” and “seniority” (Polsby 1968) needs to be refined
and somehow completed by a more fully fledged comprehension of the possible consequences of
turnover. In this respect parliamentary turnover during the first six legislative terms of the EP is not
just an interesting reality “in progress”, but also a puzzling one: to what extent do the specific
opportunity structures that MEPs face and the different institutional designs of the national political
systems lead to a “less familiar” pattern of elite stabilisation at the European level?
Consequently, the paper has three operative goals: firstly, we will discuss in depth the peculiarities
of parliamentary turnover in the EP. Secondly, we want to provide a robust and clear-cut empirical
description of the long term trends of MEP’s parliamentary tenure, especially accounting for
country-by-country variations. Thirdly, we will start testing a couple of hypotheses that may explain
political careers patterns among Members of the European Parliament. We end by discussing our
finding’s broader implications.
2. Parliamentary recruitment and circulation. The specificity of being a MEP
Elite circulation within the EP is clearly more complex than elite circulation at the level of domestic
parliaments – in particular, turnover in Europe seems to be considerably higher than in most
Western parliamentary systems (cf. Westlake 1994; Corbett 1998). Two factors may explain this: an
uncertain parliamentary recruitment process and fewer political incentives for a European as
compared to a domestic political career.
For candidates it is often more difficult to enter the EP for the simple reason that, in order to be
elected, usually a larger number of votes is needed than within the domestic political context. This
is so especially in the smaller EU member states with only a limited number of seats within the EP.
Higher electoral thresholds reinforce the prerogatives of “central” selectorates (where central means
“located at the domestic level”) and frustrates the sense of control that incumbent representatives try
to have over some kinds of delimited “constituency”. The political incentives for becoming a MEP
are also relatively uncertain. Certainly, MEPs can be quite “visible” just because of the very fact
they are elected by larger numbers of voters. However, speaking politically, a European career may
end in ‘golden isolation’. This depends, of course, on a complex interplay of opportunities, where
the mutual permeability of domestic and European career paths play a crucial role. This leads
directly to our second dimension. What type of political payoffs can MEPs expect? Although many
observers argue that, with the passing of time, a growing number of politicians has been interested
to work as “specialists” of supra-national issues (Scarrow 1997, Verzichelli and Edinger 2005), the
importance of domestic politics and the multi-level nature of the policy-related games in the EU
will always push many Strasbourg politicians to “look down” to the domestic political level. This
implies a lot of exchange between the two levels, with a likely high degree of bidirectional
movements from the one level to another – the “integrated” model of political career, to use the
definition by Borchert (Borchert 2003). Also, this would entail some significant differences across
country and across time. For instance, in some countries MEPs tend to use their mandate as a
“stepping stone” to the national parliament, while in other countries the domestic career is used as a
“springboard” for a European one (Kjaer, 2006). To what extent generous material incentives can
compensate for less attractive political career prospects for MEPs is a question that we intend to
start answering in this paper by taking the different national salary and pension schemes of
Members of the European Parliament into account.
Having this framework in mind, our purpose here is, at first, to use some well-defined indicators to
measure parliamentary tenure (and the main lines of variation across time and across different
member countries). Subsequently, we seek to explain the observable differences in tenure among
MEPs. We will also shed some light on the consequences of different tenures, in particular with
respect to parliamentary careers, i.e. the promotion to positions like president or vice-president of
the parliament, chair(wo)man or vice-chair(wo)man of the EP party groups, or with respect to
committee chairs.
Our variable of central theoretical interest is the rate or level of parliamentary turnover in the EP,
measured by two concepts, the return rate and the re-election rate (cf. Manow 2007). A member of
parliament is returned if he or she has been member of the preceding parliament and is then elected
to the subsequent parliament. In contrast, a member of parliament is understood to be re-elected if
he or she had been elected into the previous parliament and then again is elected to the next
parliament in the following elections. The incumbency return rate is then defined either broadly as
comprising all those who do return to the following parliament, or more narrowly, as all those who
get re-elected. Whereas the first definition (parliamentary turnover = 1 – return rate) counts
substitutes that became member of parliament during the term among those remaining in
parliament, the second definition (parliamentary turnover = 1 – re-election rate) excludes them, thus
leading to the calculation of a higher rate of parliamentary turnover. Both concepts have
straightforward operationalizations: returning MEPs are all those who sat in the EP on the last day
of the preceding parliament and the first day of the new, re-elected MEPs are all those who sat on
the first day of the last and of the preceding parliament in parliament (Manow 2007).
Basis of our calculations are the information on past and present members of the European
parliament provided by the official webpage of the EP. The EP’ official webpage provides very
detailed information on each and every member of parliament since the 1st direct European election
in 1979, and in case the elected MEP had been member before 1979, the webpage also provides
information for this earlier period. Information includes: name, nationality, profession, date and
place of birth, national party membership and party-group affiliation within the EP as well as a
detailed overview over the various positions the MEP in question held within the EP. We
complemented this already extremely rich data set with data from the various handbooks of the
European parliament for the pre-1979 period so that we have a complete data set covering all
persons who ever have been member of this parliamentary body from its foundation in 1953 until
the last direct elections in 2004. Moreover, we also tried to trace post-parliamentary positions with
the help of Wikipedia and personal homepages in order to investigate the political whereabouts of
those who left the European parliament.1
Our data set includes 2863 cases, with 749 members who sat in Strasbourg before 1979. Of those
749, 644 do not re-appear after 1979. In other words, we have 105 ‘returning’ MEPs, who managed
to continue their pre-1979 career in the elected EP. 2114 MEPs only joined the European
Parliament in July 1979 or later. We therefore have a complete data set for all members of the EP
from 1953 to 2004. Average tenure of the 644 delegated MEPs who did not return to the elected EP
was 1927 days. The other 2219 MEPs stay in parliament for on average 2751 days, with a minimum
of 0 days (the Polish MEP Ryszard Roman KALISZ, who resigned the very same day he was
elected into the European Parliament at the 1st of May 2004), and a maximum of 15,881 days (the
MEP Astrid Lulling from Luxembourg). When looking solely at the post-1979 period, average
parliamentary tenure is 2,605 days and maximum tenure is 10,863 days (twelve MEPs served for
this maximum period: John PURVIS, Astrid LULLING, Marco PANNELLA, Francis WURTZ,
Hans-Gert PÖTTERING, Jens-Peter BONDE, Emma BONINO, Klaus HÄNSCH, Karl von
WOGAU, Paul VERGES, Bill NEWTON DUNN and Ingo FRIEDRICH). What may explain
differences in tenure? It is to this question that we now turn.
1 We were able to merge two independently created data sets, one created at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, from the EP’s official webpage as well as from the various EP’s handbooks, the other data set with rich biographical data generated at the Centre for the Study of Political Change (CIRCaP) at the Università di Siena. We are extremely grateful for the assistance by Holger Döring, as well as for the important support by Dominic Heinz , Sebastian Hübers and Antonella Fois.
3. Explaining tenure: some working hypotheses
In this paper we are primarily interested in factors that can explain cross country variance in
parliamentary tenure, since – as we will demonstrate in the next section – it is here where most of
the variance lies. We will look at tenure in the EP from two perspectives. First, by asking whether
turnover in Europe is exceptional if compared to other parliamentary systems. Second, by
comparing the different national incumbency return rates of MEPs in EU-member states. In the first
perspective we are interested in indicators that give us some information about the degree of
‘institutionalisation’ of a legislature (Polsby 1968; 1975). The almost thirty years since the first
direct elections to the EP allow us to ask whether turnover in the EP has decreased over time and
therefore is finally coming closer to levels common to other established democracies. We will also
compare the tenure of pre-elective and post elective members asking whether the introduction of
direct elections in 1979 has led to either higher or lower turnover. When analyzing cross-country
determinants of turnover we will look particularly at the effects of electoral rules (cf. Matland/
Studlar 2004) and will also take a closer look at those who drop out of the EP. With which
destination are they leaving the EP? Is there evidence that MEPs leave the parliament because a
more important and attractive political career waits for them at home (the ‘stepping stone’
hypothesis; cf. Corbett 1998; Kjaer 2006)? Another reason for a voluntary exit can of course be the
desire to retire, and with the inclusion of an age variable we might try to account for this motivation
to leave the EP.
But to what extent are there recurring and stable differences between countries in the long run, once
we keep the most relevant institutional factors constant? Our data reveal strong and persistent ‘cross
section’ effects. To what extent these differences point to different kinds of European careers and to
what extent does longer tenure eases the entry into the political leadership in the EP? This is a
research question inspired by the recent literature on the institutional specificities of parliamentary
recruitment (Best and Cotta 2000), elite circulation (Borchert and Zeiss 2003) and incumbency
(Matland and Studlar 2004).
Among the factors responsible for the varying levels of turnover, electoral rules play an important
role. At the same time, the trend towards uniform electoral procedures in European elections,
initiated twenty-five years ago and finally brought to an official legal outcome – the amendment of
the 1977 legislation concerning EP elections – allows us to ask whether differences in turnover rates
have decreased with increasing uniformity of the electoral rules applied in all EU-member states.
Persisting differences would point to other factors beside electoral rules relevant for parliamentary
turnover. However, as Farrell and Scully have pointed out (Farrell and Scully 2005) European
elections are still far from being uniform even under the 2004 regulations. Therefore, we will need
to define carefully congruence and divergence between electoral rules in order asses their impact on
turnover. Following the electoral systems literature we want to test the following propositions: 1)
Proportional electoral rules lead to higher turnover than majoritarian rules, and, after the adoption of
a generally defined proportional principle (in fact already in 1999), MEPs who are elected in a
country with a high mean district magnitude are more likely to be ‘sacked’ by the national
selectorate. 2) the single transferable vote and the use of a preference vote should lead to higher
turnover as compared to closed list PR, creating space for another type of involuntary cause of exit:
an “intra-party defeat”. 3) Differences in allowances and pension entitlements should explain at
least to some extent the different chances of survival of different MEPs. Here, minimum age
thresholds and limits on the accumulation of pensions for the former national (and European)
representatives should leave their mark on the varying life-expectancies of representatives of
different nationality EP.
Finally, we have to ask whether turnover differs between parties and party families within the EP.
Given the more pro-European attitude of some party families, we might expect that the most
Europeanised parties would find greater difficulty in imposing internal discipline leaving more
space to those MEPs who are more genuinely committed to the work of supranational institutions.
This would have the effect to limit the room for an involuntary type of exit like the “failure to be re-
nominated”. We might also expect that the affiliation to the core-parties or to the governmental
parties more than the mere identification with the project of European integration should be a
decisive factor in determining different degrees of continuity among MEPs. This is consistent with
a number of studies explaining the different rate of euroscepticism (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2006),
and it would lead to, in the long run, a clear divide in the pattern of parliamentary turnover between
the (national) parties compared to all the parties which represent the anti-establishment, anti-EU
protest. Different means and indicators can be used to test the propositions. In purely quantitative
terms, a higher degree of homogenization (and a possible reduction) of the parliamentary turnover
would be expected among the parties with a clear and undoubted pro-Europeanist profile. This
would correspond, following the first proposition above indicated, to a greater extent of the
“control” exercised by the EU transnational party federation over the same national-based candidate
selections, that is to say, a limit to an involuntary form of exit. Otherwise, a stronger personal
engagement within the EU institutional business by a larger and larger slice of politicians expressed
by these parties would represent a limit to a voluntary form of exit. However, we should also be
able to read through the lines of the data set some qualitative signs of a changing behaviour in some
of the party actors under analysis: stories like the abandon of a practice of rotation (like the
tourniquet, implemented among Gaullists before their integration within the EU “party system”) or
the significant decrease of the substitution rates in the parties more “Europeanized” vis-à-vis the
persisting high rate of withdrawals among the soft and hard Euroskeptic EP party groups would be
significant indicators ion order to test the above arguments.
A concise summary of the main lines of the research we want to propose, the working hypotheses,
the basic arguments which lie behind them and the definition of the main indicators, is reported in
the following box
Box I broad hypotheses, possible correlations and main indicators
WH 1 (diachronic change)
- Institutionalisation of the EP: Is the EP becoming a ‘normal’, established legislature? time → seniority → normality Indicators: increase in tenure; a stable nexus between seniority and internal careers within the EP - Persisting mobility (EP mandate as prevalent stepping stone) Indicators. Fluidity of MEPs (high rate of inners and outers) .
WH 2 (country specific effects)
- country by country analysis Indicators: Electoral institutions, other institutional features (dual mandate, nationally varying financial incentive [allowance’s, pension scheme])
WH 3 (party/ideology specific effect)
- party families Same indicators as above, controlled party by party. - Strong impact of “core parties” or “governmental parties” Same indicators as above, controlled by each single party position and by the presence in government of the different parties at the moment of the EP elections.
4. Turnover, continuity and career progression of MEPs. A long term descriptive analysis
We move now to the empirical part of our paper. In this section we present data on trends in the
direct-elected EP (return rates, re-election rates), whereas we will try to test first explanations for
the observable variation in the following section (Section 5). We can start with the aggregate
measurements of our dependent variable. After six consecutive direct elections to the EP we can
figure out a general rate of turnover (re-election and return rate) which can be compared to the rates
observed in other national parliaments.2 This comparison (Table 1) confirms that the overall
incumbency effect within the EP is clearly less marked, with a return rate of on average around 47%
and a re-election rate of only around 41%. Over time, no clear trend can be depicted from our data
(Table 2). If at all, the probability to return to the EP decreases over time. This hardly supports a
view of a creeping normalization and institutionalization of the EP in the political system of the EU.
On the other hand, if compared to other lower chambers elected in federal states, the EP does not
seem to differ too much (e.g. if compared to the Canadian House of Commons or even to the Swiss
Federal Assembly). Once we control for differences in term length by looking at yearly average
turnover, the rate of elite continuity within the EP even is higher than in these two national
institutions (we have to keep in mind, though, that Canada itself is a clear outlier with respect to
turnover (Matland and Studlar 2004) and that Switzerland is not a parliamentary democracy).
Table 1: Incumbency return rates of MEPs in comparison to some federal countries
N of elections Incumbency
return rate Turnover per
year US 8 84,9 7,51
Australia 6 80,0 7,87 Canada 4 53,1 13,0
Germany 7 74,9 6,28 Switzerland 4 64,3 13,4
EP 5 47,0 9,4 Sources: Matland/ Studlar 2004; Manow 2007
2 Our overall rate does not include the first direct election in 1979, although some kind of continuity could be measured between the indirectly elected EL and that elected in 1979. 60 representatives who sat in the last “nominated” EP were in fact directly elected, together with some other 12 persons who had previously served in the EP. Therefore, the rate of re-election was 30.3, while the overall percentage of MEPs with a previous experience in the EP (calculated out of the new total number of MEPs) was 17,6.
Table 2: Return and Re-election rate in the EP, 1984-2004
Returned MEPs
Reelected MEPs
Seats (term ex ante)
Return Rate
Reelection Rate
I to II Term (1984)
220 188 434 50,7 43,3
II to III Term (1989)
255 186 518 49,2 35,9
III to IV Term (1994)
237 219 626 37,9 35,0
IV to V Term (1999)
286 229 626 45,7 36,6
V to VI Term (2004)
345 293 626 43,8 46,8
Notes: - Greek MEPs elected in 1981 are counted both for return and reelection rate (N MEPs started as 410 in 1979
but then was 434); - Portuguese and Spanish MEPs elected in 1987 are counted both for return and reelection rate (N MEPs started
as 434 in 1984 but then was 518) - Austrian, Swedish and Finnish MEPs elected in 1995-1996 are counted both for return and reelection rate (N
MEPs was 626) - For the 2004 point we have counted the “observers” of the 10 new member states in the return rate. NMEP is
therefore 626 for the reelection rate and 788 for the return rate
Whatever we may infer from this comparison between the EP and other consolidated western
parliaments, it is evident that the degree of circulation within the EP is, in comparative terms, rather
high.
We would also like to highlight that the average return and re-election rates hide another interesting
aspect, namely the significant differences between EU-member countries. Once we restrict our
analysis to the 4 largest country delegations (Italy, France, UK and Germany) in order to control for
the number of MEPs and for the length of EU-membership, we can identify two models of
parliamentary circulation which emerged already in 1979 and remained quite stable ever since:
circulation has been dominating among French and Italian MEPs, where the re-election rates never
exceeded 40% and even went below 30% between 1984 and 1994. On the contrary, British and
German MEPs show stable and relatively high rates of continuity. 10 years (and 2 elections) after
the first exploratory study on turnover and career patterns in the EP provided by Susan Scarrow
(Scarrow 1997), we can corroborate the picture emerging then, with a clearly distinguishable cluster
of long termers committed to a European career and one of short termers who conceive the EP as
just a temporary stop in their domestic political career (see Figures 1 and 2).
20,0
30,0
40,0
50,0
60,0
70,0
80,0
1979-1984 1984-1989 1989-1994 1994-1999 1999-2004
FranceGermanyItalySpainUnited Kingdom
Figure 1: Reelection rates by country, 1979-2004
20,0
30,0
40,0
50,0
60,0
70,0
80,0
1979-1984 1984-1989 1989-1994 1994-1999 1999-2004
FranceGermanyItalySpainUnited Kingdom
Figure 2: Return rates by country, 1979-2004 A possible alternative explanation for the presence of quite a relevant number of short termers
could be the choice of some parties to fill a good number of prestigious seats in the EP to old
politicians who come to Europe in times of their political twilight. This has been a recurrent
argument in the literature and is even supported by a number of significant cases, above all during
the first legislative term3. However, after 1984 the mean age of MEPs has been steadily decreasing
(the average age of Members of Parliament was 49.2 years during the first term, 47.9 during the
second, 46.3 years in the third, 46.3 in the fourth, and 46.6 in the fifth), and the differences by
country almost disappeared, although the Italian MEPs remain a significant outlier with a mean age
higher than 53 years. Therefore, the phenomenon of sending old party notables for just one or two
terms to the EU seems to have become less important than it was in the past.
A second indicator of ‘circulation’ points to the rather exceptional position of the EP: the European
Parliament is also an assembly presenting a stable rate of voluntary substitutions (we can call it
turnover between elections). To the best of our knowledge, among the students of the EP only
Corbett has stressed this point as another peculiarity of the EP. But the absolute figures concerning
in-between turnover have been never reported in the literature (see Table 3).
Table 3: Turnover between elections I Term II Term III Term IV Term V Term Resigned 59 72 51 71 64 Substitute and the resigned 14 2 2 3 5 % Total resigned 16,8 14,3 10,2 11,8 11,0Dead during mandate 13 4 3 4 2 % Total turnover between elections
19,8 14,3 10,4 12,5 11,3
As a matter of fact, on average another 14 % of all MEPs leave the parliament during the term for
various reasons. The most relevant of these reasons seems to be the opportunity to achieve a
somehow more attractive position ‘at home’, thus confirming the hypothesis of the use of the EP
mandate as a stepping stone towards the most relevant domestic political offices (Kjaer 2006).
Typically, the most favourite positions are those of national minister/junior minister and/or that of
national parliamentarian. However, the range of “destinations” of those MEPs who leave Strasbourg
is quite broad and diversified over the years. As one can see from table 3, although the magnitude of
the phenomenon is decreasing after the second legislature, more than 10% of the MEPs still use to
3 Among the MEPs elected in 1979 we find one “over 80” representative (Louise Weiss) and a dozen “over 70”. In this group of representatives we find prestigious personalities like Rey Jean, Giorgio Amendola, Guido Gonnella, Pierre Pfimlin, Altiero Spinelli, Edgar Faure and others.
exit the EP early, before the ‘normal’ end of their mandate at the end of the legislative term4. This is
per se quite a robust indicator of the weakness of the EP as an arena where the most ambitious
politicians may want to keep playing. However, such a structural weakness seems to be balanced by
a more and more important role played by the EP as a potential springboard, promoting the MEPs
towards other relevant political positions. Some recent events have confirmed this role of the MEP
mandate: for instance, the resignation in 2006 of a handful of Italian MEPs who took important
offices in the new Prodi Cabinet (Bersani, Bonino, Di Pietro and Letta) and the ministerial
appointments achieved by Cecilia Mallmstrom (Sweden) and Anna Elzbieta Fotyga (Poland).
Once again, a comparative perspective reveals significant cross sectional differences. The number
of resigning MEPs in France (85) is more than three times that of the Germans (28) and more than
eight times that of the British (10). If it is true that this has been due mainly to the systematic
turnover (tourniquet) practiced by the Gaullist MEPs during the fist legislature, it is also true that
this practice has persisted, and that we see a similar tendency to resign early among the Italian
MEPs also (52 resigning before the end of their mandate). This confirms our finding or two clearly
distinct career patterns among members of the European Parliament: a stable model of EP seniority
(Britain and Germany) versus a persistent model of low seniority (France and Italy).
Turnover variations by country
This cross-sectional patterns become even more manifest if one considers the survival rates of the
MEPs from the largest four delegations (see Figure 3). In this chart we matched French with
German and British with Italian MEPs. A comparison among these four member countries can
control for the size of the four delegations and for the length of EU-membership (all 4 countries
have been member in 1979). The figure makes immediately evident that long termers (4 to 6
mandates) or even medium termers (3 mandates) are much more present among the British or
German MEPs. In contrast, both in Italy and France the category with one only mandate is largely
predominant, and the possibility to overcome the threshold of 2 elections is highly unlikely.
This would support the hypothesis of country-specific factors in the explanation of turnover in the
EP. Such an argument is anyway difficult to be generalised to all the country delegations, due to the
different size and the different time span covered by these delegation (6 terms for 10 delegations, 5
for the Spanish and Portuguese MEPs, 3 for Austrian, Swedish and Finnish MEPs, just one term for
4 The table does not report the data about the current legislative term. Between the election and April 2007 the number of retired MEPs was 49 (roughly 7% of the total number of MEPs elected in 2004). Considering that this period cover roughly 3/5 of the duration of the legislative term, we can foresee an overall rate of turnover between the VI and the VII European elections higher than 10%.
the delegations of the 10 Member states joining EU in 2004). However, the rough summary
reported in table 4 (the country by country average number of elections among MEPs) indicates a
consistent range of variation in all the three groups of member states analysed: a clear polarisation
is confirmed among the “old” member states (with the Dutch value very close to Uk and Germany
at the top of the “seniority” ranking, while Greece marks the lower rate of seniority, together France
and Italy). Furthermore, Spain shows a clearly higher rate of seniority in comparison to Portugal, as
well as Austria does, in comparison to the two countries joining EU in 1995, Finland and – above
all – Sweden.
U.KITALYGERMANYFRANCE6
5
4
3
2
1
6
5
4
3
2
1
275 250 225 200 175 150 125 100 75 50 25 0 2752502252001751501251007550250 275 250 225 200 175 150 125 100 75 50 25 0 2752502252001751501251007550250
Figure 3.General tenure during six EP legislatures (1979-2006) MEPs elected in the largest countries
Note: general tenure simply measures whether the MEPs has been present for some time (i.e., 1 day counts like 5 five years)
Table 4: Average number of elections among MEPs, by country
Country Average N of elections N MEPs
Germany 1.9 303
UK 1.9 260
Netherland 1.8 99
Belgium 1.7 112
Luxemburg 1.6 30
Denmark 1.5 71
Ireland 1.5 67
France 1.4 452
Italy 1.4 413
Greece 1.3 145
Spain 1.7 214
Portugal 1.4 110
Austria 1.6 49
Finland 1.4 43
Sweden 1.3 60
Note: 3 MEPs elected in 2 countries are counted in both the countries
Variations in the parliamentary recruitment “system of opportunity”
Our main working hypothesis (see above) was based on the theory of parliamentary
institutionalisation, and it assumed that, with the passing of time, the EP is becoming a “normal”
legislative arena, with a rather regular and relatively cohesive rate of renewal. This assumption
also entails that a stabilised “system of opportunities” would have emerged in the EP, thus
allowing the consolidation of some predominant patterns of parliamentary recruitment (Norris
1997). In general, we can assume that the two most important elements of MEPs’ recruitment,
that is to say - respectively - the systemic context and the demand factors (Norris 1997; 1999)
have been slowly but clearly consolidated during the time span 1979-2004. With respect to the
systemic context, we can actually speak of a real convergence of the most important factor (the
electoral rules). Although these rules are far from being harmonised (Farrell and Scully 2005),
the adoption of a PR system in all the member states since 1999 has allowed a sufficient degree
of similarity in the basic process of parliamentary recruitment. However, the EP remains a unique
case of elective legislative body dominated by a number of elements of malapportionment. This
justifies the inclusion of both the basic electoral rules and of other changing characters of the
electoral legal framework as possible independent variables in our multivariate analysis (see
below).
Another reason to speak of a “normalisation” of the system of opportunities to access to EP is the
reduction of the dual mandate phenomenon (Figure 4), that is to say the attitude to elect to
Strasbourg representative who were holding, at the time of the European Election, a seat in their
national parliament. The trend of the dual mandate had been at first reduced by “voluntary
incompatibilities” fixed by single parties or national rules, and then imposed by the same EP.
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
1979 1984 1989 1994 1999
Figure 4: MEPs with dual mandate, in %
For what concerns the demand factors, two opposing arguments can be raised. On the one hand,
the consolidation of a “European party system” grounded on a cluster of party families, and
particularly the predominant role of the two largest federation (EPP-ED and PES) achieving 65%
of the EP seats both in 1999 and 2004, could be easily argued as the evidences of the
consolidation of this fundamental factor of parliamentary recruitment. On the other hand, the real
selectorates of the selection of MEPs remain the national parties: this issue reproduces an “old
dilemma” anguishing the scholars of European parties (Bardi 2003): the choice between focusing
on the behaviour of EPPG (EP party groups) or the organisational study of trans-national party
federations within the EU.
Under this point of view, the analysis of parliamentary turnover can add some interesting hints: in
fact, if we have a closer look to the distribution of newcomer MEPs among the two largest
EPPGs (Table 5) we discover that that being part of the EPP or the PES does not make any
difference in terms of rate of renewal. In other words, country by country variations in
parliamentary turnover look much less evident than variations among EPPGs, thus invalidating
the thesis of a strong role of party family affiliations in shaping our dependent variable. At the
same time, the third column, reporting the data of all the MEPs, tell us that the degree of renewal
of the two central EPPGs is systematically lower than the overall figures. This element would
mean that the party variable is not completely uncorrelated to patterns of parliamentary
recruitment, being the new and/or “peripheral” party families less oriented to consolidate a
critical mass of Euro-politicians. This argument is also consistent with recent studies based on the
more “pro-European” attitude of the European “core parties” vis a vis the other clusters of
national parties.
Table 5 Newcomer MEPs in the two largest EP party groups
Soc (%) EPP/EPP-ED (%) Tot MEPs
1984-1989 81 (53,3) 57 (47,1) 232 (48,5)
1989-1994 78 (42,4) 51 (40,9) 250 (46,6)
1994-1999 108 (49,1) 88 (50,0) 355 (56,2)
1999-2004 84 (43,1) 134 (54,0) 353 (52,6)
2004-2006 89 (44,5) 124 (45,9) 369 (50,2)
Note: the figures refer to all the MEPs belonging to a given EPPG during the legislative terms (including substitutes)
A persistent complexity within the European representatives
If the systemic context of the European parliamentary recruitment looks somehow simpler and
more cohesive than 25 years ago, it is not clear to what extent the “points of access” and the
process of circulation of the EP elite today could be considered significantly different and linked
to a clear, predominant model. In the end, this was implicit in the conclusion of the recent study
by Pippa Norris (1999, 100): after arguing that “the European parliament is now as highly
professionalised as national parliaments, in terms of the political experience”, Norris affirms that
“the consequences of this development, however, remain open to debate. Arguments about pros
and cons of the growth of career politicians often revolve around different perceptions about the
most appropriate role of parliamentarians”. This affirmation is particularly interesting in our
perspective, because it implies that behind the high rate of turnover within the EP there is a
persisting situation of variation/fragmentation in this elite. In a nutshell, this would mean that,
although a critical mass of Euro-politicians is probably today effectively at work (Verzichelli and
Edinger 2005), the reasons of being elected to EP are still so numerous and possibly changeable,
that we would expect both a high range variation across country and also a significant range of
variation in each sub groups (country or party- delegations)
We cannot cover this issue extensively here. But it is important to mention at least two elements
that corroborate the hypothesis of a persisting complexity. First of all, although, as we already
said before, the mean age of MEPs has been reduced with the passing of time, it has remained
constantly over the threshold of 50 years, that is to say a figure which is quite higher than the
average of the lower chambers in Europe. The most reasonable explanation of this phenomenon
is that a broad pool of aspirants can develop interest in an EP seat, from the young stepping
stoner to older politicians engaged with a “mature” phase of their career, to the extreme case of
the old leader at the twilight, running for a prestigious “parking place”. This argument seems to
be also corroborated by the analysis of the mean age of fresh MEPs: the overall figure for this
group has always been between 47,5 and 50 years in the time span 1979-2004, which is supposed
to be a rather old age for a “beginner” in any European parliament.
Secondly, the analysis of political backgrounds of current MEPs also confirms a persisting degree
of variability of career patterns in the EP: in the first legislative terms, when dual mandate was a
relevant element of parliamentary recruitment (see above), the fact to get an office (also) in the
domestic parliament did not prove to be a particular predictor of non re-election (a sort of
voluntary exit); our data in fact confirm that the expectations of re-election were roughly the
same both among dual mandate MEPs and non dual mandate MEPs (figure 5).
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
I Term II Term III Term IV Term
Dual mandate holdersNon dual mandate holders
Figure 5: % of re-elected MEPs within dual mandate holders and non dual mandate holders
The disappearance of the dual mandate phenomenon does show the “opening” of a number of
new possible points of access to the MEP position. However, we cannot underestimate the
“traditional” elite career filiere linking the probability of success in Strasbourg with a respectable
and probably long experience on the national political scene. Our data collected on the bases of
official and unofficial web pages and other biographical sources show that the domestic
parliamentary experience, although it has clearly decreased, is still today a fundamental card to
be played in order to be elected to the EP, since roughly one MEP out of 4 comes from the
domestic parliament (Figure 6). In other words, this means that the “complexity” of the current
EP elite (and the consequential degree of variation in its patterns of re-election/return) are
somehow functional to the very differentiated “demand factors”: young and relatively old
candidates, national and supranational oriented politicians, more or less skilled aspirants can find
good chances to spend some years in the EP. The choices of each national “selectorate” and a
number of contingent factors (also at the domestic level) seem to be every time decisive in the
consolidation of a mere “supranational” elite, interested in being re-elected in the EP.
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
1979 1984 1989 1994 1999 2004
FGIUkAll MEPs
Figure 6. National parliamentary experience before entering the EP (%)
In this section we provided empirical evidence for the following arguments:
1) parliamentary turnover in the EP has evolved, accordingly to the “institutionalisation
theory”, but the pace of such phenomenon is rather limited and slower in comparison to
the experiences of the main national legislatures;
2) country-specific factors of variations seem to be much more crucial than party-specific
factors;
3) both the diachronic evolution and the comparison across country shed a light on the fact
that the recruitment of MEPs used to be (and somehow it is still) a matter of complexity,
since many types of politicians with different sorts of political backgrounds are involved
in the process.
We should now move back to our hypotheses, trying to limit them and focus more attentively
upon some crucial elements. In particular, we can restrict the analysis to the explanation of re-
election/return rates, including in our in depth analysis three main group of explanatory variables
like time, the different “original” institutional settings and the party/party family affiliations. In
the next section we explicitly aim at saying something more on the correlations
4. The multivariate analysis of turnover among MEPs
If we want to explain the significant cross country variation in tenure, the following factors have
to be controlled for. First of all, we need to control for the date of entry of new member states
over the period of our investigation. I.e., differences in tenure between members of the European
Parliament are first of all caused by the fact that our data is differently ‘left censored’, i.e. result
of the fact that some countries entered the EU only after 1979. Trivially, MEPs from these
countries can have stayed only for a much shorter period in the EP compared to MEPs from
countries which had participated already in the first direct election in 1979. We therefore have to
control for the fact that the first EP-election in Greece was held in October 1981 (18.10.1981), in
Spain at the 10.6.1987 and in Portugal at the 19.7.1987, in Sweden at the 17.9.1995 and in
Finland and Austria in October 1996 (the 20th and 13th of October, respectively). All the ten new
member states from Central and Eastern Europe had their first election to the European
parliament in June 2004. There are several ways how one can account for these different
membership periods. First of all, we could restrict our comparison to those countries who have
participated in all six ‘regular’ EP-elections. This – however – would mean that we restrict our
analysis to a much smaller number of observations. We could also try to explain the share of the
maximum possible and the actual tenure for each country, or – alternatively – we could try to
predict tenure and simply control for the different entry dates of our countries. It is this last
strategy which we will apply here.
Our other independent variables include: electoral system (PR, plurality or STV), preference
votes (no, one, or more than one preference vote), electoral thresholds, mean district magnitude,
number of seats in the EP,5 and MEPs’ salaries. Since we lack good comparative data on the
difference between national pension allowances, we could not control for this – presumably
important – factor in our analysis. It seems plausible that the generosity of pension allowances
5 Since these vary over time, we took the average number of seats over all elections in which the country participated.
co-varies with the generosity of MEPs’ salaries. If members of parliament successfully granted
themselves a generous pay scheme, they should also have been successful in designing for
themselves favourable pension schemes. This at least is suggested by prominent cases like the
Italian one. For explaining tenure eligibility criteria (after how many terms is one qualified for
drawing a pension?) are even more important than the overall generosity of pension payments.
However, as mentioned, since we lack good comparable information about parliamentary pension
schemes, we were not able to integrate this kind of information into our regression model.
One might also consider including country dummies in order to test whether there is an impact of
other domestic institutions that have not been captured by the variables in our model. We
experimented with various model specifications, but report only those with the best overall fit. As
shown in Table 5, in particular the very short tenure times of French and Italian MEPs remain
largely unexplained by our theoretical variables and therefore country dummies remain highly
significant. We infer that particularities of the French and Italian party systems account for some
of this unexplained variance. Moreover, we will control for the age of the MEP at the moment of
entry into the European Parliament following the assumption that tenure should be negatively
related to the MEP’s age at the moment of his or her first appearance in the European Parliament.
We will present the results of two regressions, the first takes the tenure since the first direct
election to the European Parliament as the dependent variable, in the second model we are
looking at overall tenure, i.e. we include (but at the same time control for) the time spent in the
European parliament before the first direct election. As the comparison of column 1 and column
2 reveals, there is obviously a group of EP-members who could look back at a very long pre-79
career and subsequently were highly successful in continuing their career in the elected European
parliament.
Table 6: Explaing tenure in the European parliament, OLS regression6
post79 tenure Total tenure Total tenure Length of post-79 EU-membership
0.216 0.210 0.189
(0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** PR list -1,934.594 -1,886.924 -1,703.775 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** Single Transferable Vote -2,703.763 -2,661.774 -2,399.573 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** District Magnitude 19.493 19.250 17.773 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** Preference Vote 855.634 842.209 750.178 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** Italy -2,548.322 -2,491.387 -2,672.174 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** France -876.328 -734.894 -689.098 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** Age at entry in the EP -0.102 -0.112 -0.113 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** Tenure pre-1979 3,183.557 3,184.006 (0.000)** (0.000)** Salary 0.065 (0.087) Constant 3,248.570 3,433.631 3,220.996 (0.000)** (0.000)** (0.000)** Observations 2207 2207 2201 Adjusted R-squared 0.199 0.287 0.287 p values in parentheses; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1% Sources: district magnitude Hix; salary – von Armin; electoral rules – Farrell and Scully, Corbett
et al.;
As was to be expected, the length of EU membership comes out as one of our strongest
explanatory variable – it explains roughly a fifth of the variance in our dependent variable. The
electoral rules variables (PR and STV) have to be interpreted against the one system excluded
from the analysis, the plurality system prevalent in the UK for all EP elections until 2004. We
find, in accordance with the literature (cf. Matland/ Studlar 2004) that both PR and the STV
result in significant higher parliamentary turnover. As compared to the relative majority in single
member districts candidates from countries with a PR system or with the STV-system leave the 6 We are aware that OLS is a problematic choice. In revised versions of this paper we will apply survival analysis.
European parliament on average 2000 or 2700 days earlier than their colleagues from the UK.
Both larger districts and the option to cast preference votes prolong the tenure of MEP’s. As can
be seen from Table 6, the age at the moment of entry has a significant impact on the overall
tenure time, but we cannot find any strong influence of the salary – neither a positive, nor a
negative. Finally, as already mentioned, the strong coefficients for our two country dummies
show that our model is far from capturing all relevant aspects explaining tenure in the EP. The
better overall fit of the model once we include (but also control for) the pre-elective period prior
to 1979 shows that a small group of European long-termers we able to continue their career very
successfully after direct elections to the European parliament had been introduced.
Once we treat tenure not as a dependent, but as an independent variable we are interested in the
impact of tenure on EP-internal careers, measured here as the frequency with which single MEPs
are promoted to such positions as committee chairman or –woman or to the position of a
president or vice-president of a party group within the EP. We have created a career index
measuring committee chair- or vice-chair positions (a score of 3 and 1, respectively), presidents
or vice-presidents of party groups (a score of 4 and 2, respectively) as well as the position as
president or vice-president of the parliament (score 5 and 6). In Table 7 we display the effect of
tenure, of national seat share in the EP (to account for proportionality rules with respect to
country representation in the committees and EP-presidency), of seniority (age of entry) on the
status within the EP. We also control with a country dummy for British MEPs in order to analyze
whether they combine long tenure with only little shown leaning to pursue an EP-internal career.
Table 7: Explaining patterns of EP-internal careers. The impact of tenure on position taking in the EP
(committee and party group chairs, and membership in the EP presidency)
Tenure 0.001 (0.000)** pre79 0.001 (0.000)** Seats -0.014 (0.000)** Ageentry 0.000 (0.449) UK -0.612 (0.054) Constant 0.026 (0.960) Observations 2207 Adjusted R-squared 0.250
p values in parentheses; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
As one can see from Table 7, seniority in the sense of EP membership does play a significant
role, seniority in the sense of age does not. And in this context both pre-79 and post-79
membership are relevant. Every 1000 days of membership in the EP (either before or after 1979)
lead to an increase by – on average – one score on our ‘status index’ A clear sign of country
proportionality persists - i.e. small countries with only a limited number of EP seats are clearly
over represented when it comes to committee assignments or elevated positions in the EP party
groups. This eventually means that, although the “pool of aspirants” to the most relevant chairs in
the EP is normally formed by senior MEPs (defined simply as representatives with a long
experience within the EP) the allocation of the offices follow, as first and basic rule of the game,
a “parity norm” of equal (or at least weighted) representation of all the country delegations.
5. Preliminary conclusions
All in all, the changes in turnover within the EP seem to have followed a trend that is not easy to
predict, due to the impact/noises from a number of variables and dimensions. Surely, some
evidences indicate a slow increase of seniority in the EP after 1979, as well as the emergence of a
relatively strong link between the MEP’s average length of service and the likelihood to get top
leadership positions within the parliament. This evidence would therefore support, at least
partially, our initial working hypothesis grounded on the institutionalization theory which
stipulates the logical sequence: time → seniority → ‘normality’ of an institution. However, the
EP is still clearly an unusual parliament from the point of view of its organisational logic. At
least, the process of institutionalisation of such a collective body cannot be seen using the same
lenses that have been at length used in the analysis of domestic parliament. Indeed, the structure
of opportunities for the aspirants to the office of MEP has very much changed over the years: the
systemic context has been impacted by the progressive abrogation of the dual mandate, as well as
by the partial harmonisation of the electoral systems. The sedimentation of several elements of
what we could probably define a pattern of “European parliamentary career”, corresponding to a
new space for a critical mass of European politicians, come together with the persistence of some
“old” features, including the domestic parliamentary background of several MEPs and the
orientation of many others to “step back” to the domestic careers. All these elements would
determine what we have called a persistent complexity in the patterns of elite recruitment and
circulation within the EP.
The second hint we can get from our data concerns the confirmation of several strong country-
specific effects. Both the descriptive figures of the turnover trends and the multivariate analysis
we subsequently introduced clearly indicate that the tenure in the EP is strongly characterised by
the same lines of distinction which were emerging already in 1979. In fact, the country by
country comparison of career patterns of current MEPs roughly confirms past findings.
Particularly, the polarisation between the two models observed looking at the “big four” country
delegations is still striking, with a much higher turnover among Italian and French MEPs as
compared to those of British and German MEPs. We still need to inquire into the effects of party
families, something which we hope to do in revised versions of this paper.
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