*** Welcome to piglix ***

Academic studies of the political groups of the European Parliament


Academic studies of the political groups of the European Parliament refers to the studies of those groups by academics, the methods that they use and the conclusions that they reach.

The political groups of the European Parliament have been around in one form or another since September 1952 and the first meeting of the Parliament's predecessor, the Common Assembly. The groups are coalitions of MEPs and the Europarties and national parties that those MEPs belong to. The groups have coalesced into representations of the dominant schools of European political thought and are the primary actors in the Parliament.

Some of the groups (such as PES) have become homogeneous units coterminous with their Europarty, some (such as IND/DEM) have not. But they are still coalitions, not parties in their own right, and do not issue manifestos of their own. It may therefore be difficult to discern how the groups intend to vote without first inspecting the party platforms of their constituent parties, and then with limited certainty.

Additionally, national media focus on the MEPs/national parties of their own member state, neglecting the group's activities and poorly understanding their structure or even existence. Transnational media coverage of the groups per se is limited to those organs such as the Parliament itself, or those news media (e.g. EUObserver or theParliament.com) that specialise in the Parliament. These organs cover the groups in detail but with little overarching analysis. So although such organs make it easy to find out how a group acted on a specific vote, they provide little information on the voting patterns of a specific group.

As a result, the only bodies providing analysis of the voting patterns and Weltanschauung of the groups are academics.

Academics analysing the groups include Simon Hix (London School of Economics and Political Science), Amie Kreppel University of Florida, Abdul Noury (Free University of Brussels), Gérard Roland, (University of California, Berkeley), Gail McElroy (Trinity College, Dublin, Department of Political Science), Kenneth Benoit (Trinity College, Dublin - Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS)), Friedrich Heinemann, Philipp Mohl, and Steffen Osterloh (University of Mannheim - Centre for European Economic Research).


...
Wikipedia

...