Working at home: French MEPs’ day-to-day practice of political representation in their district

Abstract

In the early 2000s, Simon Hix and his colleagues declared EP constitutes a good laboratory to test theories and hypotheses about legislative or party behavior. However, scholars mainly focused on roll-call votes analysis allowing them to investigate voting behavior, coalitions formation as well as activities in technical committees. We argue that work in Parliament should not be investigated without considering constituency work. Surprisingly, despite the institutionalization of district work, only a few studies focused on micro-level linkages between MEPs and citizens. The results show that MEPs are in contacts with citizens having matter with the EU but not directly with their constituents. In the district, MEPs are more experts of the EU than members of the community. By investigating day-today contacts between citizens and their MEPs, this paper offers a new perspective on the debate about the democratic deficit of EP and EU institutions.

Blurred lines between electoral and parliamentary representation: The use of constituency staff among Members of the European Parliament

“…Several studies report that ballot structures affect behaviour in the EP. MEPs from candidate-centred systems maintain more contacts with constituents, hold permanent local offices (Bowler and Farrell, 1993; Farrell and Scully, 2010), do casework and surgeries (Poyet, 2018), and display greater presences on social media than MEPs hailing from party-centred systems (Daniel et al, 2019). We begin by verifying that these insights also apply to MEPs’ prioritization of staff allowance.…”

Electoral incentives for territorial representation in the European Parliament

“…Other studies (Bowler and Farrell 1993;Farrell and Scully 2010;Tomkova 2014) used survey data to analyze the time spent by MEPs working in their home countries, on individual voters' requests, and their likelihood to organize surgeries or to do online constituency outreach. Ethnographic research, following MEPs in their districts to observe contacts with voters and local interest groups is all but absent, the exception being the study of Poyet (2018). Similarly, scholarship on constituency orientation analyzing actual legislative behavior from the EP is scarce.…”

“…The presence of the two elements, vulnerability and a candidatecentered electoral formula might also interact with strategic calculations of national parties or of the MEPs themselves. The former would target increases in the overall share of votes, while the latter would be based on the idea that such efforts can be a steppingstone for further national or regional careers (Poyet 2018;Høyland et al 2019). Leaving aside the issue of electoral consequences, in the following paragraphs I present this study's main arguments regarding how electoral system incentives and electoral marginality might influence engagement in the representation of territorial interests in the EP.…”