Abstract
To cope with the socio‐economic consequences of the Covid‐19 pandemic, the EU has adopted a new approach by launching an instrument aimed at promoting cross‐national solidarity, called Next ...Generation EU. This could trigger major changes in terms of EU power and authority, calling into question the polity's legitimacy, and the kind of solidarity to be embodied in the European system. As part of the scholarly debate on transnational solidarity, the article focuses on the politicisation of the Covid‐19 crisis within the European Parliament, with a focus on opposition parties. By applying discourse analysis, the article explains how the crisis has acted as a catalyst for framing opposition parties' stances about the relationship between legitimacy and solidarity in the EU polity. Furthermore, the article examines how opposition parties have assessed their competing views on the role of the EU's political system and on future developments in the integration process.
The continued relevance of the second-order elections (SOE) theory is one of the most widely debated issues in the study of European Parliament (EP) elections. While the theory has been criticised ...from many angles, the recent success of populist, extremist, and Eurosceptic parties raises additional questions about the applicability of a model that depicts EP elections as a low-stakes affair revolving around national issues. This article tests the SOE model with party-level data from all 175 EP elections held between 1979 and 2019. While turnout in EP elections remains well below participation rates in national elections, the 2019 EP elections were marked by a significant reduction in the average turnout gap. Across all election years, party size is the most potent predictor of electoral gains and losses in EP elections. Incumbency is associated with electoral losses in most EP election years. These effects are moderated by the electoral cycle and the electoral system in some but not all years. The expectation that the SOE model performs worse in countries with fragmented party systems was not confirmed. All in all, the SOE model continues to wield significant explanatory power in both the West and the East.
The condition of EU democracy is hotly debated and European Parliament’s political groups and Europarties play an important role in continuing power struggles between European Union institutions. To ...harness the increased power of both the European Parliament and European citizens, the formal and informal relationships between the political groups and Europarties matter, with the Spitzenkandidatur process as a crucial aspect. Using a dataset of 135 semi-structured interviews, this article looks beneath the formal rules that structure European Parliament’s political groups and Europarties. Exploring how MEPs construct these relationships, it discusses leadership, institutionalisation and stances toward European integration as core elements of the relationship between Europarties and political groups in the European Parliament.
The question of the democratic character of the European Union (EU) has been a center-point of decades of political research. An important critique suggests that the development of the European ...political arena is still incomplete, with European parliamentarians primarily orienting themselves to national issues and politicians, implying a problematic mismatch between the political arena and their policy jurisdiction. Research has however been limited by methodological difficulties of capturing the level of Europeanization of the political arena. This paper contributes a novel method for measuring Europeanization by studying interactions between the European Parliament to their national parliamentarians on Twitter in 15 EU countries. Contrary to expectations in the literature, we find substantial Europeanization of the political arena. The level of Europeanization furthermore varies greatly across countries and political groups. This has important implications on the debate on EU’s democratic deficit, as communication across different levels of parliament indicates democratic debate.
The contribution investigates the role of religion in the work and attitudes of Polish members of the European Parliament (MEPs). It draws on two types of data: the results of the Polish part of the ...survey on Religion in the European Parliament and in European multilevel governance II (RelEP2) and qualitative content analysis of Polish MEPs' speeches from the first part of the European Parliament's ninth term of office (July 2019-June 2021). The analysis of the MEPs' plenary speeches reveals the pivotal role religion plays in articulating the main national political divide between sovereignists and Europeanists over attitudes to European integration. Religion, treated primarily as a cultural resource and identity marker, has become instrumental for the process of politicisation of EU integration at the supranational level - mirroring processes on the domestic level - pursued especially by MEPs representing right-wing orientations. The analysis of the survey results demonstrates that Catholicism constitutes an important element of many Polish MEPs' individual value systems and identities. However, this translates into an ambivalent perception of the role of religion in the context of the public sphere.
An increasingly polarized European Parliament (EP) has become an important site of radical right populist opposition to gender equality. Through a qualitative analysis of populist interventions in EP ...plenary debates on gender equality in the 8th legislature (2014–2019), this article identifies the discursive strategies adopted by right populists to oppose gender equality. It contributes to scholarly debates on populisms and on gender and politics by respectively suggesting to the former the need to dedicate attention to gender equality as a central aspect in populist ideologies, and to the latter the importance of considering a variety of strategies of radical right opposition to gender equality. Radical right populist strategies include not only indirect but also direct opposition to gender equality and draw on old and traditional gender imaginaries packaged in novel populist ways.
The heterogeneity of foreign policy preferences has hampered a more effective Common Foreign and Security Policy. We examine the dimensionality of the EU foreign policy space by analyzing foreign ...policy votes in the European Parliament (1999-2019). As it contains the EU's full geographical and ideological diversity, it is an important laboratory for testing expectations about what predicts foreign policy positions. Party ideologies structure voting on foreign policy: party-political disagreements over the CFSP and military interventions matter more on foreign policy votes than others. The left-right dimension and the EU integration dimension still explain a considerable share of voting patterns, although they matter less on foreign policy votes than others.
Over the past 25 years, a field of research concerning the careers of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) has developed. Drawing on a massive amount of accessible open data, we have assembled ...an updated database including all MEPs from 1979 to September 2019. In this note, we describe the data collection processes and the construction of the database. Then, we propose an application concerning the turnover at the EP following the 2019 European elections. The longitudinal perspective provided by the database allows us to describe this turnover, which is important, but varies greatly according to nationality and political group, and does not fundamentally alter the division of parliamentary power. Finally, we identify some limitations: the lack of data in MEP profiles and difficulties both in the comparison between people from 27 countries and the comparison over a long period (1979–2019). As a result, the article shows that automated data collection can be very useful. However, in the case of individuals, as MEPs, it should be seen as a complementary source to other sources.
Hailed by many as a game-changer in political communication, Twitter has made its way into election campaigns all around the world. The European Parliamentary elections, taking place simultaneously ...in 28 countries, give us a unique comparative vision of the way the tool is used by candidates in different national contexts. This volume is the fruit of a research project bringing together scholars from 6 countries, specialised in communication science, media studies, linguistics and computer science. It seeks to characterise the way Twitter was used during the 2014 European election campaign, providing insights into communication styles and strategies observed in different languages and outlining methodological solutions for collecting and analysing political tweets in an electoral context.
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