Pulling the Strings: Party Group Coordinators in the European Parliament

Since its post-Lisbon increase in (legislative and non-legislative) powers, the European Parliament (EP) is more relevant than ever in the geographically diversified multilevel system of the EU. Party group coordinators occupy a crucial position in collective decision-making within the EP. However, knowledge about these pivotal actors is absent. This raises the question as to who these party group coordinators are, what they do, and what indeed makes a good coordinator. A new data set shows that in 2012, more than one-fifth of coordinators of the three largest and most influential groups are German, with British and Spanish coordinators ranking a distant second before Romanians. Among coordinators from NMS, only one-eighth were newcomers.