Comparing USA and EU Legislatures: Party Cohesion in the House of Representatives and the European Parliament.

Given its recent development of becoming a fully fledged legislature in EU politics, the European Parliament is increasingly compared to the USA House of Representatives. At the same time, a lot of scholars that have analyzed the evolution of party cohesion within the European Parliament (see, for instance, Hix et al. 2007) do not refer to the American example. This is surprising since there is a long tradition on research looking at party cohesion - socalled party votes - within the House of Representatives (see, for instance, Roberts and Smith 2003). This paper wants to bridge this gap by comparing and explaining figures of party cohesion between the USA House of Representatives and the EU European Parliament. The analysis of party or roll-call votes is part of a broader research agenda that deals with the question whether the European Parliament is developing towards a legislature such as the House of Representatives or, in other words, whether the European Parliament can be better understood by comparing it to the USA House of Representatives. Some comparative research on these two legislatures has already been done. Kreppel (2006), for instance, compared the European Parliament with the House of Representatives by looking at three emblematic features of the House: its legislative power, the role of committees and bipartisan voting. Despite the notion of 'American exceptionalism' that is often referred to when analyzing national legislatures of EU member states, her analysis demonstrated that the European Parliament shares these characteristics to a large degree. This paper will examine whether this also applies to party cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]