BEYOND COHESION: PARTY DISCIPLINE AND DISSENT IN THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ROGER SCULLY Department of International Politics University of Wales, Aberystwyth e-mail: rgs@aber.ac.uk Paper for the Political Studies Association-UK 50th Annual Conference 10-13 April 2000, London Abstract The study of cohesion in the European Parliament (EP) has been led by an obvious question: how can stable and coherent collective decision-making occur in a chamber encompassing representatives from such a wide variety of national and partisan backgrounds? Despite the numerous apparent obstacles to such agreement, previous research has demonstrated a surprisingly high degree of cohesion among the multi-national party groups that exist in the chamber. However, in concentrating on establishing the existence of significant party cohesion, research has generally neglected analysis of the converse situation: understanding the occurrence of dissent from the party line. In the latter part of the paper I consider how dissent might best be examined and develop the implications of such research for our understanding of the politics of the EP.