When legislators choose not to decide: Abstentions in the European Parliament

Monika Mühlböck and Nikoleta Yordanova

European Union Politics, 2017, vol. 18, issue 2, 323-336

Abstract: Why do legislators choose to vote ‘Abstain’ instead of ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay’? Is it because they shy away from taking sides when facing competing demands? We address this question by studying roll-call vote data on the sixth European Parliament. In line with our principal–agent approach, we find that Members of the European Parliament are prone to strategically abstain when torn between different positions of their national party, their transnational party group, and their country’s minister. Abstentions are thus not random but strategic and ignoring them may bias the findings of legislative studies.

Keywords: Abstentions; competing principals; European Parliament; representation; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116517694369 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:18:y:2017:i:2:p:323-336

DOI: 10.1177/1465116517694369

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().