European Parliament: Debating in a Legislature with Competing Incentives

The European Parliament is an extraordinary legislature due to its multinational nature, and its mixed internal legislative organization. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are subject to mixed incentives: they have to heed both national and European Party Groups’ (EPGs) leaderships, but also have significant opportunities for individual floor access. The chapter uses speech counts from 1999 to 2019, scraped from the EP official website. The analysis finds that frontbench domination of speeches is not constant and has weakened over time. Changes in internal procedure appear to be an important explanatory factor, while member states’ electoral systems do not seem to play a role in explaining frontbench domination patterns. The study also finds that EU-level government–opposition dynamics do not play a role, while ideological extremism does explain speechmaking patterns. In terms of individual level determinants of legislative speech, senior MEPs are granted more floor time, while there is no difference between male and female MEPs in their debate participation rates.