Regional Variation in the European Parliament—The Use of Parliamentary Questions

• In Event: The Effectiveness of Oversight in the European Union in Euroskeptic Times

Abstract

The European Parliament has seen its responsibilities, visibility, and political salience increase as the EU has sought to address allegations of the democratic deficit. The political decisions of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), therefore, are similarly of increasing importance when looking at political oversight and decision-making at the European level. Parliamentary questions are one of the primary formal tools available to MEPs for information gathering, agenda setting, and oversight. Existing literature in legislative studies, including some focusing on the European Parliament directly, has found political affiliation can affect use of parliamentary questions and legislative oversight capacity; however, national differences in a multinational legislative context remain understudied.

This paper will address this gap in the literature by focusing on differences in uses of the parliamentary question process between MEPs representing older member states and post-Socialist states that have joined since 2004. This paper will take a mixed-methods approach, combining elite interviews conducted with MEPs and senior Commission officials, conducted in Fall 2018, with an original, large N dataset containing approximately 160,000 question-answer dyads of submitted parliamentary questions between 1994 and 2018. These dyads consist of the text of questions submitted by MEPs to the Commission or Council and the answers provided by EU officials, combined with relevant biographical data. Topic modeling, quantitative text analysis, and natural language processing will be used examine the text in questions submitted by members of the European Parliament assess how national and/or regional differences affect the way MEPs use the parliamentary question process. This approach will allow for examination of geographical differences as well as within-region changes over the entire study period (1994-2018).

Author

• Matthew Stenberg, University of California, Berkeley