Expertise, turnover and refreshment within the committees of the European Parliament: as much like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain as we may think?

ABSTRACT

Expertise is a resource, which parliamentary committees organise to support the legislative work of their plenaries. Informational theories posit that expertise is gained from time spent on committee, so how does the committee system of the European Parliament (EP) react to high levels of membership turnover? Using qualitative interview evidence and CV data, this paper explores how expertise is utilised within the EP’s committee system and provides some alternative accounts of its usage. This paper demonstrates that membership turnover, an inevitability of democratic legislatures and perceived as detrimental to committees from the loss of experienced policymakers, can have potentially positive benefits. I find that turnover can not only refresh the observed committees’ institutional relationships but also clear away potential deadwood that is manifested as members who are past their policymaking primes. I argue that an injection of new blood is a resource that EP committees utilise to help maintain relevance.

KEYWORDS:

• European Parliament
• committee systems
• expertise
• committee refreshment
• legislator turnover

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 24th International Conference of Europeanists (12–14 July 2017). The author would like to thank Dr Myrto Tsakatika for her insightful comments and suggestions on the development of this paper, and Professor Maurizio Carbone for his support. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues at the University of Glasgow Comparative Politics Cluster for their invaluable feedback, the anonymous referees and the editor. This research project was funded by an ESRC DTC scholarship [ES/J500136/1]. Any errors within this paper are the responsibility of the author.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J500136/1].