European Parliament’s Political Groups in Turbulent Times

Abstract

The European Parliament’s Political Groups in Turbulent Times is the most recent work in the emerging studies of the European Parliament (EP) under the pressure of the post-2008 decade of crises. While the content is dense, ranging from theoretical debates to empirical discussions of the EP’s political groups, the findings of the 12 chapters greatly contribute to mitigating the limited existing studies involving the political groups of the European Parliament over the last decade or so. The authors were invited to develop their research according to the formal or informal institu-tional practices regarding inter - or intra -group interactions and inter-institutional activities (p. 8–10). The result was a collection of chapters analysing the internal democratic practices of the EP groups (chapters 2 to 4), the behaviour of Euroscepticism and radical right populist actors within the EP (chapters 5 to 7) and the role of political groups in transmitting EU values (chapter 9 to 10). Concerning democratic practices at the EP’s political groups, chapters 2 to 4 have provided some important insights on intra-groups activities by focusing on groups’ formation (chapter 2), the institutionalisation of the political groups (chapter 3) and the practices behind policy formation within the political groups (chapter 4). In terms of democracy, the general conclusions of these chapters unveil that democratic practices within EP’s political groups are quite divergent among mainstream and institutionalised political groups and new and less institutionalised radical right populist groups. For example, that could be seen in Ahrens and Kantola’s chapter, in which the authors analysed the issue of political groups’ formation throughout the 8 th and 9 th legislative terms. According to the authors, in almost all the groups, group formation practices were supported by democratic functioning, to a lesser extent in radical right populist groups, where the practices of group formation are a bit more ad hoc . Almost along the same line, the chapter by Elomäki, Gaweda and Berthet sheds light on differences between