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

Sorace, Miriam (2018) Legislative Participation in the EU: An analysis of questions, speeches, motions and declarations in the 7th European Parliament. European Union Politics, 19 (2). pp. 299-320. ISSN 1465-1165. E-ISSN 1741-2757. (doi:10.1177/1465116518757701) (KAR id:80692)

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.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1177/1465116518757701
Uncontrolled keywords: European Parliament, European Union, legislative behaviour, parliamentary questions
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Politics and International Relations
Depositing User: Miriam Sorace
Date Deposited: 01 Apr 2020 11:43 UTC
Last Modified: 04 Mar 2024 17:25 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/80692 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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