Acceso usuarios
Thomas Malang, Veronika Ohliger
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is not just the oldest butalso the most institutionalised and powerful international parliamentary assembly.As transnational parliamentary body with the Russian Federation and Ukraineamong its members, it showcases a laboratory for transnational parliamentaryvoting behaviour in the context of international geopolitical conflicts. We theorisehow geopolitical aggression between member states change the voting pattern inthe assembly. Whereas we generally assume a partisan cleavage as the mainsorting mechanism, we theorise that this dimension will diminish undergeopolitical threat. To test our claims, we explore voting patterns in the PACEaround the Russian annexation of Crimea 2014. Using all contested votes from2012 to 2016, we find that voting positions are structured around nationalinterests in times of geopolitical tensions whereas a left-right cleavage emergesonce the aggressor (i.e. Russia) was absent from the PACE.
