Philip Manow / Luca Verzichelli

Tenure and Parliamentary careers in the European Parliament

University of Konstanz/ University of Siena (philip.manow@uni-konstanz.de; verzichelli@unisi.it) Paper prepared for the ECPR joint sessions, Helsinki, 2007 1st Draft, May 2007, comments are welcome, do not quote without the permission of the authors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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