Electoral incentives for territorial representation in the European Parliament

ABSTRACT

While many citizens are indifferent about the EU, most MEPs are invisible in national politics and European Parliament elections are not fought based on parliamentary activity records, some legislators still pursue territorial interests or foster constituency linkages. What explains such behavior? Drawing on written questions data from the 6th and the 7th terms of the European Parliament (EP) this article shows that despite the virtual absence of an electoral connection in EP elections, electoral system features, and electoral marginality influence the MEPs’ engagement in geographical representation. Electorally marginal MEPs ask more questions on regional and national topics as do MEPs elected from STV systems. There is no evidence for a differential effect of district magnitude depending on ballot structure.

KEYWORDS:

• European Parliament
• electoral systems
• representation
• parliamentary questions

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the participants at the Workshop ‘Legislators as Linkage in European Democracies’ (ECPR Joint Sessions, Nicosia, April 2018) and at the 5th Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments (Leiden, June 2019) for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Written questions are a suitable indicator for territorial representation efforts because they are less constrained by party leaders than other parliamentary activities and are not affected by the measurement problems of survey data: limited coverage, self-selection bias, rationalization. (Martin 2011; Sozzi 2016a).

2. Following an EU Council decision (2002/772/EC) dual mandates were prohibited in the EP starting with the 2004 elections. Exceptions were allowed for Ireland until 2007 and UK until 2009. Only 6 MEPs benefited from the exception, all from Ireland.

3. Both Italy and France use sub-national multimember districts for the election of their EP representatives.

4. The possibility that some legislators would concentrate on alternative constituency-oriented strategies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UCLouvain through the ‘MOVE-IN Louvain’ Incoming Post-doctoral Fellowship, co-funded by the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission.