Puming Zhang

  Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences | Bachelor European Studies

Tracing the Rebel: The Influence of National Interest on Members of the European Parliament’s Rebel Voting Behaviour

Puming's elevator pitch
Do national interests motivate Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to go against their European Political Group? To explore this phenomenon known as rebel voting, my thesis looks at roll-call votes in the 9th EP. I built a multilevel logistic regression model to analyze more than 465,000 votes to see whether the voting cohesion in national delegations influences this rebellion. Surprisingly, my results show that stronger national interests actually discourages rebellion against the Political Group: after controlling for multilevel confounders, I found that a 0.1 increase in national cohesion lowers the probability of rebellion by nearly 19%, while substantial heterogeneity exists across Member States and individual MEPs. I propose a possible explanation: most MEPs remain loyal to both their Member State and their Political Group, while rebellion is mostly driven by a small number of "dual-rebel" MEPs that pursue other interests. My thesis therefore contributes to understanding how national politics may influence EU decision-making.