Expert groups in the building of European public policy

Special issue: The Europeanisation of education policies"When it comes to building European public action, expertise is ubiquitous and polymorphic. This article intends to study the ways expertise is being used in the European Commission and the logics underlying its use. The massive use of expertise also has consequences for the practices and identities of actors with whom European institutions coproduce public policies. On these subjects, the current debates on how experts are selected who oppose the Commission, European parliament members and NGOs, offer a stimulating field of investigation.

Parliamentary questions and representation of territorial interests in the EP

This chapter explores the territorial dimension and its recent evolutions during the current European Parliament’s mandate. This territorial dimension is generally considered to be central to the process of representation at the national level but has been relatively neglected in the EP to date. Rather than assuming an electoral disconnection between MEPs and EU territories, authors take an inductive approach to empirically examine the extent to which territorial representation is reflected in members’ practices. To do so, they rely on an analysis of MEP’s written questions, which constitutes another understudied topic. The content of these questions is used as an indicator of members’ priorities, centres of interest, and conception of their mandate, as well as of their evolution in the recent period of time