McElroy, Gail. "Policy positioning in the European Parliament". European Union Politics, Vol.13, No.1 (2012): 150-167.

McElroy, Gail. "Policy positioning in the European Parliament". European Union Politics, Vol.13, No.1 (2012): 150-167.

• Members of European Parliament [MEPs] are elected as members of national delegations, who then join political groupings in the European Parliament. This creates a potential issue of split loyalties, where individuals are forced to choose between national loyalty and parliamentary group loyalty (151).
• Party groups within the European Parliament will change depending on national and parliamentary political decisions. Party groups respond to these changes by modifying their ideological stances, often in attempts to differentiate themselves from other groups, attract new national delegations, and retain popular legitimacy with the electorate (151).
• Larger changes in the power distribution between groups in the European Parliament were observed during the 2004-2010 period due to the destabilization caused by European enlargement during that time. This period also saw increased euroscepticism, resulting in an influx of new parties and changing political pressures (152).
• Additionally, the new powers of the European Parliament to exercise jurisdiction over several new issue areas following the Lisbon Treaty have emphasized some previously unimportant policy differences, which will result in new power dynamics in the Parliament (153).
• The Irish  Fianna Fail party left the Union for a Europe of Nations and joined the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group following the 2009 elections largely because it was uncomfortable with the increasingly Eurosceptic nature of the previous group (154).
• At the far-left of the political spectrum is the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL), followed by the Greens. The three largest party groups – the S&D, the ALDE and the EPP – occupied positions at the left of centre, centre and right of centre, respectively. On the far-right of the policy scale, are the European Conservatives and Reformists group and Europe of Freedom and Democracy (156).
• The author categorizes both the European Conservatives and Reformists group and the GUE/NGL group as Eurosceptic during this period, with the Greens being so as well, but to a lesser extent (159).
• Data shows that most European parliamentary groups are fairly good at keeping their parties within similar ideological ranges, with the least internal consistence exhibited by the ALDE group. Overall, however, internal policy positions are remarkably similar despite different national groups (162-163).
• The author does express doubts, however, of the validity of scoring groups in European Parliament on traditional right-left dichotomies considering the unorthodox political issues involved (163).
• There is much more significant variation between the stances of national delegations within parliamentary groups on support for European integration. Interestingly, the groups with the widest differences in political stance are the ECR and the GUE/NGL groups, which range from emphatically pro-EU to hard Eurosceptic (164).