Who has the critical vote? Power ranking of MEPs in the Agricultural Committee of the European Parliament A. Kovacs¹; I. Fertő²; L. Kóczy²; B. Sziklai²; A.A. Nás² 1: Tec de Monterrey, Department of International Business, Mexico, 2: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Economics, Hungary Corresponding author email: [email protected] Abstract: We analyze the voting power of the members of the agricultural committee of the European Parliament using a spatial Banzhaf power index. Using a novel dataset of roll-call votes in the current EP-term, we identify critical members whose votes are necessary to form winning coalitions. We found that committee members with formal positions, EP group coordinators as well as German, French, Italian and British members are powerful actors. Nevertheless, rapporteurs are not necessarily influential. We also concluded that members with moderate ideological position but from Member States with extreme agricultural importance are the most powerful ones. Acknowledegment: JEL Codes: C71, A12 #1419 Who has the critical vote? Power ranking of MEPs in the Agricultural Committee of the European Parliament Abstract We analyze the voting power of the members of the agricultural committee of the European Parliament using a spatial Banzhaf power index. Using a novel dataset of roll-call votes in the current EP-term, we identify critical members whose votes are necessary to form winning coalitions. We found that committee members with formal positions, EP group coordinators as well as German, French, Italian and British members are powerful actors. Nevertheless, rapporteurs are not necessarily influential. We also concluded that members with moderate ideological position but from Member States with extreme agricultural importance are the most powerful ones. Keywords: European Parliament, Common Agricultural Policy, voting games, Banzhaf index, voting game over a convex geometry 1. Introduction Discussion about the content as well as the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) have been high on the political agenda in the last decades and generated strong scientific attention as well. CAP reforms have been subject to comprehensive analysis both from political and policy aspects. In his landmark book, “The Perfect Storm” on the 2003 Fischler reform, Swinnen (2008) shares the view that this has been the most radical reform of the CAP since its creation. Ten years later, another, more moderate CAP reform, the “Imperfect Storm” (Swinnen, 2015a) took place. Swinnen (2015a) identifies four key domains of this reform: first, the drivers and the assessment of the reform (see Swinnen, 2015b); second, the factors influencing policy outcomes, including internal, like the Multiannual Financial Framework (Matthews, 2015), as well as external factors, like the WTO negotiations (Swinbank, 2015); third, the content, including direct payments (Sahrbacher et al., 2015) or the so-called greening (Erjavec et al., 2015); finally, the institutional aspects, with focus on the role of the European Parliament after the entering into force of the Treaty of Lisbon (Fertő and Kovács, 2015; Olper and Pacca, 2015). Throughout the last CAP reforms and the EU’s legislation on agricultural policy, scholars focused on the external and internal stakeholders, their motivations and influence on the policy and legislative outcomes. Similarly, the driving forces, constraints and achievements of reforms have been part of the political and scientific discourse. On the other hand, the decision-making of the CAP, the role and influence of various stakeholders on the legislative outcome is still largely uncovered. This is especially true for the European Parliament and its members. This article aims at filling this gap by analyzing the role of the Members of the European Parliament’s agricultural committee (COMAGRI, Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development) in the CAP legislation through coming up with quantifiable power scores based on the roll-call votes of agricultural legislative pieces. 1 The aim of article is to analyze the power relations and the legislative influence of the COMAGRI members of the European Parliament. This paper provides the voting power ranking of the MEPs – both Members and Substitute Members – of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development based on their policy positions along two dimensions: ideological spectrum of national parties and the agricultural value-added in the total GDP of the Member States of the MEPs. Unlike previous research on the power of Member States in the Council, we focus on the analysis of the European Parliament. Contrary to previous studies on intra-EP structures, like committees or EP Groups (Whitaker, 2005), we concentrate on the decision-making at the level of individual EP members. The main novelty of the paper is that it comes up with quantified power scores of individual MEPs in any policy domain, based on the members’ position in the ideology space. We provide the ranking of the MEPs – both Members and Substitute Members – of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development on the basis of their Banzhaf power index in a voting game over a convex geometry. We classify members along two dimensions: an ideological spectrum and the value-added to the GDP by agriculture. These two dimensions induce an ideology space, where the members are placed. For the first dimension the member is assigned a value based on the left-right measure (ParlGov) of the political party he/she belongs to. For the latter we use the World Bank agricultural value added index of the member’s home country. 2. Influence on EU decision making There is a broad literature on the role and influence of EP committees. Westlake (1994:191) described the Standing Committees as the “legislative backbone” of the European Parliament. Many authors emphasize the increasing role of committees in shaping EU legislation. In addition, Mamadouh and Raunio (2003) find that the allocation of the rapporteurship measures the power of Committee members. Neuhold (2001) argues that the key players in the EP committees are the committee chairmen, the vice-chairs – holding the formal positions in the committees –, as well as the rapporteurs, also draftsmen of opinion, shadow rapporteurs and party coordinators in the committees. Kaeding and Obholzer (2012) also emphasized the key role of EP Group coordinators in the legislative process at EP committee level. In line with Kaeding (2004), Marshall (2010) also states that rapporteurs are the most powerful actors of the committee, but also added that the distribution of influence among ordinary members of the committees is still unclear. Regarding the role of COMAGRI in the EP, Greer and Hind (2012) concludes that the COMAGRI plays key role in agricultural legislation. Fertő and Kovács (2015) corroborated this finding. Power indices are widely used to measure the actors’ a priori voting power in the legislative and political decisions in the EU institutional setup. In the EU context, most papers deal with the power of Member States in the Council of the European Union – better known by its former name: the Council of Ministers (Algaba et al., 2001; Le Breton et al., 2012; Bilbao et al., 2002; Barr and Pasarelli, 2009; Kóczy, 2012), studying the fairness of voting weights (before the Lisbon Treaty) and how the extensions of the Union affected existing members’ powers. It is important to stress that these models study voting power a priori, that is, without taking policy positions into account. This approach is usually motivated by the assumption that the subject of voting and therefore the voters’ policy positions are not known in advance. When we study voting in the COMAGRI this approach is neither informative nor appropriate. We assume that members have clear policy positions that can be approximated by their 2 political inclinations and the significance of agriculture in their delegating member states. We present a model with this information taken into account. Dataset The dataset of this analysis contains three sources of information. The first source of information is the roll-call votes of legislative proposals and amendments in the COMAGRI during the first two years of the current EP-term. In case of the roll-call votes, we listed the votes of MEPs – for, against and abstention –, both Members and Substitutes of COMAGRI. The second pillar of the dataset is the ideological position of the MEPs based on the left-right ideological orientation of their national parties (Döring and Manow, 2016). The third dataset used in this analysis was the agricultural value-added in the percentage of the GDP (The World Bank, 2013) of the Member State of the MEP. These latter two constitute the two dimensions of the analysis. 3. Methodology We study the COMAGRI members’ ability to make and change decisions using spatial voting indices. Here we introduce and explain the method we use. We consider a set of voters. Subsets of voters are called coalitions. A coalition is winning if it is able to make a decision according to the voting rule, for instance, by having the majority of the votes. Coalitions that are not winning are called losing. We are interested in critical voters, that is, players, whose loss can turn a winning coalition into a losing one. When all members of a coalition are critical the coalition is a minimal winning coalition. A priori voting power then refers to the ability to change decisions without knowing the actual topics the committee