Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have voluntarily formed transnational political groups and invariably follow the voting instructions of these groups. This is intriguing as there are few obvious incentives for doing so. Unlike national parties, for example, the political groups in the European Parliament are not punished by the electorate if they are divided on key issues, as citizens ...

In a closed-list proportional-representation system, where votes are cast for a given political party, not for any particular candidate, the seat distribution in the parliament is highly sensitive to small changes in the vote distribution among political parties. This creates randomness in who gets elected as a Member of the Parliament (MP). Using a detailed data set of the MPs in Turkish Parli...