The Influence of Party Cohesion on Subjective Political Representation in the European Union

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,7, University of Mannheim, course: Legislative Behaviour and Political Representation in the European Parliament, language: English, abstract: This research paper deals with the topic of the representation deficit in the European Parliament. It is observed, whether party cohesion as a form of legislative behaviour, influences the degree of citizens' subjective perceptions of an adequate political representation. High levels of party cohesion are expected to create individual impressions of an adequate political representation. To test this theory, I generated a roll-call votes dataset to measure party cohesion since 2017. Together with the latest version of the Eurobarometer dataset of 2018, I observe the subjective level of political representation. The empirical analysis through an ordered logistic regression shows that the hypothesis can cautiously be confirmed, meaning that higher levels of party cohesiveness are associated with higher degrees of subjective political representation.