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

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

Constitutional judicial review and political insurance

Judicial dispute resolution, Constitutional judicial review, Judicial independence, Political insurance, Binary choice/closed agenda, D72, D74, D78, K40, K41,

Finessing a point: augmenting the core

The “finesse point” introduced here extends the notion of a core; it is a position that minimizes what a candidate needs to do to counter moves that are made by an opponent. The definition, which is motivated by the “chaos theorem” as well as by the dynamics of positive and negative political campaigning, is also used to define a “malicious point,” which is an optimal location from which a candidate can engage in “negative campaigning.

Distributive politics and intergovernmental transfers: The local allocation of European Union structural funds

The European Union budget is distributed primarily in the form of intergovernmental grants to sub-state governments, which invest the grants in local projects. Transfers are allocated under the auspices of the European structural funds. This article assesses the causal links between electoral incentives on the recipient side, European funding goals, and local grant allocation. Tobit regressions of the allocation patterns in 419 local districts in Germany for the period 2000–6 suggest the following: although recipient sub-state governments enjoy substantial discretion in selecting projects, their distributive choices are largely in accord with European goals. As theoretically predicted, however, there is robust evidence that sub-state governments’ electoral concerns distort the local allocation of structural funds