16:50 - 18:30
P5
Room: South Room 220
Panel Session 5
Michael Jankowski - Patterns of party conflict over COVID-19 regulation at the supra-national level: An investigation of roll-call voting behavior in the EP
Jon H. Fiva - How Does Party Discipline Affect Legislative Behavior? Evidence from Within-Session Variation in Lame Duck Status
Zachary Greene - Mr BERT goes to parliament: a supervised approach to classifying parliamentary speech in Europe
Alberto de Leon - The audience effect: Leaders’ speeches over decentralization in different contexts.
Patterns of party conflict over COVID-19 regulation at the supra-national level: An investigation of roll-call voting behavior in the EP
P5-01
Presented by: Michael Jankowski
Liran Harsgor 1, Michael Jankowski 2, Simon Otjes 3
1 University of Haifa
2 University of Oldenburg
3 Leiden University
The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes an exceptional crisis which required immediate reactions from political decision makers at the national but also at the supra-national level. Such a crisis might lead to decreased political polarization and increased cooperation between parties (Louwerse et al. 2021). However, parties’ reactions towards COVID-19 might also be driven by their ideology, dividing parties between pro-/anti-lockdown and pro-/anti-EU solidarity and the extent to which countries are affected by the pandemic. We analyze patterns of conflict over COVID-19 policies based on a novel and comprehensive collection of roll-call votes on COVID-19 policies held in the European Parliament between March 2020 and December 2020. The EP provides a crucial case to analyze the ideological and country-specific drivers of the parliamentary responses to a worldwide crisis. Methodologically, we apply the recently developed dyadic approach to analyzing EP roll-call voting (van der Veer and Otjes 2020). Our findings provide new insights regarding the question of which factors influence political competition on COVID-19 policies.