Photo: Munich Security Conference via a Flickr Creative Commons licenceīut voting in the European Parliament is mainly along political group lines not national lines, with higher group voting cohesion than the Democrats and the Republicans in the US Congress. Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, at the Munich Security Conference in 2015. Also, while British MEPs were reasonably successful in EP6, since 2009 they have been less likely to be on the winning side than the MEPs from any other member state. Nevertheless, there is significant variation between the member states: from 93% for Finnish MEPs (and even higher for Bulgarian and Romanian MEPs, who joined in 2007), to only 71% for British MEPs. This is because many votes are highly consensual.
The first thing to note is that the average is high: about 85%.
To start with, Figure 1 shows the percentage of times each member state’s MEPs were on the ‘winning side’ in all votes in EP6, EP7 and EP8. Note: A member state’s delegation of MEPs was calculated as being on the ‘winning side’ in a vote if the plurality of the MEPs from the member state voted the same way as the majority of all MEPs in the vote. Per Cent of Times on Winning Side in the European Parliament, by Member State From these records we can see whether UK MEPs and parties tend to be on the winning or losing side in votes, and whether our MEPs and parties vote with or against the European political groups to which they belong. So, are UK Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) marginalised?Ī good starting point are the MEPs’ voting records (on and there are a lot of them: there were 6,149 such votes in the 2004-09 session (EP6) 6,961 in 2009-14 (EP7) and there have been 2,306 since June 2014 in the current session (EP8). The other half is the European Parliament, which now has the power to amend and block EU laws in almost all policy areas.
But the Council is only half of the EU’s bicameral legislature. In recent blogs I have looked at policy outcomes, voting records and policy-makers’ connections to analyse whether the UK is ‘marginalised’ in the EU Council.
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