The European Parliament's Committees: National Party Influence and Legislative Empowerment by Richard Whitaker

Author:Richard Whitaker [Whitaker, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9780415485258
Google: hKlAPgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 14839166
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-15T08:59:53+00:00

*** p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.1

Notes: Dependent variables are coded 1 for MEPs assigned to a committee and 0 otherwise. ‘None’ means that no member of the committee had this particular characteristic and that the relevant independent variable was therefore left out of the model.

The likelihood ratio (LR) chi-squared tests for the Environment and Culture committee regressions suggest that the models for these two committees overall are unreliable. In these cases, we cannot reject the null hypothesis for the LR test that the beta coefficients are equal to 0, in other words, that the models perform no better than those without any independent variables (Pampel 2000: 46). So we cannot conclude that the Environment or Culture committees differed substantially from the membership of the EPP and PES as a whole. Interestingly, on Environment there were no members with links to environmental, agricultural or industrial pressure groups, at least among MEPs from the two largest party groups. This committee did not have the prominence in 1982 that it has since developed. Looking at the results as a whole, they suggest that in the EP’s first elected term, experience in the relevant policy area was the factor most likely to explain committee assignments, that the Agriculture committee was one-sided in terms of links to interest groups, that the Budgets committee stood out in terms of committee seniority, and that elsewhere measures of preferences made little difference.

How do these results compare with the situation 20 years later, when the EP was much bigger and had gained codecision powers in many areas of policy? Table 5.4 presents logistic regression models of the same six committees for members of the EPP–ED and PES in January 2002.

Table 5.4 Committee assignments in the EP, January 2002, logistic regression results (standard errors in brackets)

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