Just give them the money? Voting behaviour on agricultural policies in the European Parliament

Voting on legislative acts on agriculture can be contentious: public pressure towards transforming European agricultural policies is high. At the same time, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) need to ensure policies protect jobs, guarantee food security, and deliver reasonable prices. As a result, far-reaching EU regulations on sustainability or animal welfare have been difficult to agree on. Despite the heterogeneity of ideas and contestation of interests characterising agricultural policymaking, there is a lack of empirical studies investigating the patterns and dynamics related to MEP votes on agricultural policy drafts. To explain MEPs' voting behaviour, we analyse votes on agricultural acts during three legislative periods (EP7, EP8 and EP9, 2009-2022) by applying a quantitative coding scheme for exceptionalist and post-exceptionalist voting drafts and estimating logit panel regressions. Drawing on theories of partisan politics, we hypothesise that MEPs belonging to conservative political groups are more likely to favour acts related to exceptionalist policy goals whereas MEPs belonging to the Greens/EFA are more likely to favour drafts related to post-exceptionalism and sustainability. Our empirical results only partly support these expectations, they also reveal the role of country membership and the need to examine differences over time.