Specialists, Party Members or National Representatives: Patterns in Co-Sponsorship of Committee Amendments in the European Parliament

Since the EP-plenary relies heavily on committee reports, tabling committee amendments is an important way for individual MEPs to influence legislation. Amendments may be tabled by one MEP, but can also be tabled in coalition. Patterns of cooperation or coalition building in tabling amendments can therefore serve to shed a light on the degree to which MEPs remain national representatives, cooperate with their EP party group or act as specialists in their legislative behaviour. These patterns of so-called co-sponsorship have been studied extensively in the context of the US-Congress. The methods developed there will be applied to the European setting to gain more insights in the degree of cross-national and cross-party networks in legislative behaviour of MEPs. This study focuses on EP-committees, since - compared to plenary setting - there is potentially less party discipline and therefore patterns of cooperation might be visible that cannot be seen in other arenas. The hypotheses will be based upon the distributive, partisan and informational theories of legislative organization, which were developed in the US-context. These competing theories pose that MEPs will cooperate within their European party group, within their national delegation or across party affiliations and national boundaries with fellow specialists on the topic. Furthermore, it can be expected that patterns of cooperation differ across policy fields. Using Social Network Analysis, I will analyse the co-sponsorship patterns in tabling committee amendments related to 1497 legislative submitted in different policy fields during the 7^th legislature of the EP.