The global #MeToo movement exposed the prevalence of sexual harassment across countries, in diverse contexts, and within institutions; including the supposedly gender-friendly European Parliament (EP). Using a unique set of interview data with key actors in the #MeTooEP campaign and Members of European Parliament and staff, this article analyzes the discursive struggles around sexual harassment in the EP. The analysis shows how these discourses fundamentally shaped the patchy institutional response to sexual harassment with findings that illuminate the resistance to institutional change.

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There is a notable gap in the academic literature on racism within European Union institutions. This article scrutinizes racism and normative whiteness in one of these institutions—namely, the European Parliament. The article asks how European whiteness, as a norm, is related to and sustains racism in the European Parliament and how this affects efforts to tackle racism and formulate internal antiracist practices within the institution. The research material consists of interviews, parliamentary ethnography, and official document data, and the empirical analysis is divided into three levels: individual, political group, and parliamentary. An important contribution is to demonstrate the techniques of reproducing whiteness as an institutional norm and racialized power relations in the European Parliament. This avoids linking racism to only the actions and attitudes of individuals and enables the article to address how racism is reproduced through the Parliament as an institution.

The role of the European Parliament’s (EP) political groups in making the European Union legislative process democratic has been mainly analysed in terms of party-political competition between the groups. In this chapter, we extend questions about democracy to intra-group policy formation and ask, how do political groups formulate group lines on policies and what impact does this have on democratic decision-making in the EP. We approach intra-group policy formation from the perspective of formal and informal democratic practices related to inclusion, deliberation and transparency that influence whose voice is heard. Our analysis is based on extensive interview data as well as the internal rules of the groups, and we pay specific attention to differences between the groups and the political dynamics within them. We argue that intra-group struggles about policy are as important for the democratic functioning of the EP as those between the groups.

The international #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment constitutes the most prominent contemporary campaign against sexual harassment worldwide. It exposed the issue by undermining the ‘culture of silence’ prevailing in several contexts, including political institutions. This article analyses one specific variant of #MeToo, the campaign MeTooEP that emerged in the European Parliament (EP). MeTooEP is unique in many ways: it was the first collective action against sexual harassment in parliaments emerging in the #MeToo aftermath and it was the first collective action within the EP led by members of the staff, which eventually drove some internal policy changes. Using a unique, large interview dataset, the analysis shows how the actors behind MeTooEP were crucial in shaping the campaign. Their knowledge of institutional rules, practices and daily presence in the EP facilitated their advocacy and transformed the Parliament into an enabling platform for their actions. With the help of Feminist Institutionalism, the analysis demonstrates how the formal and informal institutional EP bodies with their rules and regulations shaped MeTooEP in ways that constrained and empowered it.