Legislative Participation in the EU: An analysis of questions, speeches, motions and declarations in the 7th European Parliament

Abstract

Which legislative activities in the European Parliament are ‘pluralistic’ – i.e. undertaken by all Members of the European Parliament, irrespective of legislative and electoral status? What type of parliamentary activity – if any – is dominated by party leaderships or vote-seekers in the European Union? This study will advance our knowledge of legislative politics in the EU by determining whether its legislature conforms to expectations from the legislative behaviour literature. This study compares the participation patterns in the EP7 (2009–2014) parliamentary questions, speeches, motions and written declarations via multilevel negative binomial regression. It makes use of a dataset on activity levels and demographics of 842 individual Members of the European Parliament serving between 2009 and 2014. The findings highlight that highly procedurally constrained activities, such as speeches and oral questions, are dominated by frontbenchers and vote-seekers, while procedurally ‘freer’ activities – written questions in particular – are very representative of the population of Members of the European Parliament. The analysis finds that there are both ‘pluralistic’ and vote-seeking activities in the ‘second order’ EU legislature, and that participation patterns broadly conform to patterns found in other established representative democracies.

The Frequency of Use of Legislative and Non-Legislative Tools in Five Countries

“…My findings strengthen the claim of scholars that procedures matter and can affect individual legislators' behavior (Cox and McCubbins 2005;Friedman and Friedberg 2021;Sorace 2018). Based on the analysis of the allocation of resources and the degree to which legislative and non-legislative activities impose participation costs on individual legislators (Sorace 2018), these legislators prefer unconstrained, public legislative and non-legislative tools, but they also use tools that are unconstrained or semi-constrained that are just on the record, as a second-best choice. In addition, the dominancy of the party is relevant too for the strategic use of legislative and non-legislative tools.…”

“…Krehbiel (1992) defined legislative organization as "the allocation of resources and assignment of parliamentary rights to individual legislators or groups of legislators" (p. 2). Sorace (2018) argued that legislative activities differ in the degree to which they impose participation costs on individual legislators. Procedures can shape the ability of legislators to take a position, oversee the government and set an agenda (Cox and McCubbins 2005;Koger 2003).…”

“…However, the investigation of both legislative and non-legislative tools together has been neglected. This study will fill the gap in the comparative literature on legislators' behavior by analyzing the use of both legislative and non-legislative tools simultaneously (Akirav 2014;Proksch and Slapin 2015;Sorace 2018).…”

Loyal soldiers or seasoned leaders? The selection of committee chairs in the European Parliament

“…There are also legislative behavior differences between committee chairs and EP backbenchers. The former have privileged access to at least one parliamentary activity that is more constrained procedurally, namely oral questions, whereas they tend to ask fewer written questions (Sorace 2019).…”

“…One of the empirical predictions of this theory is that parties would exploit committee assignment to reward loyal members and punish those who do not toe the party line at roll-call votes. Several authors have speculated that dissenting against the EPG's voting positions would sideline MEPs for committee chairmanships (Ripoll Servent 2018: 192;Sorace 2019), in a similar manner in which this happens for rapporteurships (Yoshinaka et al 2010;Yordanova 2011b). As frequent dissenting voting behavior might indicate divergent ideological preferences, EPGs would try to avoid such nominations in order to minimize policy drift.…”