An Ever Closer Parliament: National Effects on MEP Cohesion after the Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

My review of the existing scholarship on voting cohesion in the EP revealed an emphasis on the cohesion of EPGs and their relationships with national parties. However, the intragroup cohesion of country groups was rarely studied. I hypothesize that the invasion of Ukraine would increase country cohesion and that this effect would be stronger in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. To update this literature, I combined two sources of EP voting records to build a new dataset of MEP positions on 35,338 roll call votes between 2014 and 2024. Using this dataset, I calculated a common measure of cohesion for 10 EPGs and 27 country groups across the eighth and ninth sessions of the EP. I used this dataset to establish the presence of a national effect on cohesion and to discover the main factors in country cohesion. This was done through the comparison of two models of cohesion with different underlying assumptions. This baseline analysis provides a point of reference for my second analysis on the effects of the invasion of Ukraine and Covid-19 pandemic on country cohesion. I find significant effects for both crises, negative for the pandemic and positive for the invasion. I also identify important interaction effects of the invasion on other determinants of national cohesion. Most importantly I observe a near-unanimous trend towards increasing supranationalism in the EP delegations of member states on the EU’s Eastern border.