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Out of Sight, Out of Mind? An Analysis of MEPs’ Focus on Territories in Parliament

par Behm, Anne-Sophie
Président du jury Pilet, Jean-Benoît
Promoteur Brack, Nathalie
Co-Promoteur Delwit, Pascal
Publication Non publié, 2022-03-25

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

MEPs are legislators with a multi-dimensional representative mandate. They work in a supranational assembly, deciding on policies that affect around 450 million people, are elected in ‘second-order elections’ highly dominated by the national political agenda, and have to deal with the diverging demands of their three main principals: their European political group, their national political party, and their voters. For multiple reasons, it is generally assumed that MEPs do not have a strong linkage to the citizens. On the other hand, asked about who they represent in parliament, they, themselves, claim that regional and even individual citizens’ interests are very important for their work. This paradox is the starting point of the research presented here analysing the question which role territorial activities play in MEPs’ parliamentary activities. The main assumptions this research is built on are that MEPs have multiple foci of representation which they invoke in different contexts in their parliamentary work. The territorial focus, considered to be the shortest and most straightforward link between MEPs and citizens, is one of them. Given the complex nature of electoral constituencies for most MEPs, in this research, their territorial focus is however not assumed to be restricted to their electoral districts. Instead, it includes MEPs’ references to individual concerns, the local and the regional level as much within as outside their own Member States. In the idea of representative claims-making, MEPs are expected to construct their own ‘territories’ by referring to them regularly and in an open and observable way in their parliamentary activities. The objective of this research is to shed light on this little-known dimension of MEPs’ representative mandate. In an approach that becomes increasingly detailed, MEPs’ territorial focus is analysed from different angles: first, an exploratory analysis investigates how much territory there is in MEPs’ activities. It is based on the analysis of French, Belgian and German MEPs who held a seat in the 8th European Parliament (2014-2019). All their written parliamentary questions, speeches in plenary and written explanations of vote have been manually coded for their geographical focus of representation, with a particular emphasis on the territorial one. In a second step, the research aims to find patterns of explanation for the variation observed in MEPs’ territorial focus by means of regression analyses. Third, a qualitative content analysis of the territorial activities of a subset of MEPs in the data shows what MEPs’ territorial focus is actually about on the ‘inside’. Bringing together the findings of all three research steps, the analysis concludes by presenting a typology of MEPs’ different approaches to their territorial focus. The analysis shows that the territorial focus is indeed an important dimension of MEPs’ representative work, but also that it is not a ‘constituency focus’ in the classical sense. Even if not dominant in their parliamentary activities, nearly all MEPs show some form of connection to territories in their work. They do so defending the interests of their regional electoral constituency, but also showing commitment to territories outside their own Member State and therefore clearly beyond electoral motivations. MEPs refer to territories however also for other reasons than territorial interest defence, for example as an illustration of personal stories. The MEPs with the highest numbers of territorial references in their activities are actually not necessarily the ones with a particularly strong focus on territorial interest defence. The research therefore underlines the importance of considering the territory ratio (MEPs’ number of activities with a territorial focus per 100 total activities) and the content of their activities when analysing MEPs’ territorial focus – or any other dimension of their representative mandate. Overall, the different types of MEPs’ approaches to the territorial focus identified here paint a picture of legislators searching for individual solutions to the challenges of their complex representative mandate in the context of a supranational modern democracy.