Working at home: MEPs day-to-day practice of political representation in their constituency

Corentin Poyet (1)

1 CED - Centre Émile Durkheim

In 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 (Hix 2001; Hix, Noury and Roland 2007; Kreppel 2007; Mammoudh and Raunio 2003; McElroy 2006). In this paper, we propose to go further to analyze MEPs behavior with new methodological approach mobilizing new type of data. According to Fenno (1978), we argue that work in Parliament should not be investigated without considering constituency work. Surprisingly, despite the institutionalization of constituency work (the green weeks), only few studies focused on micro-level linkages between MEPs and citizens (Farrel and Scully 2007). Mobilizing ethnographic data collected in the IMPLOC project (managed by Olivier Costa and Jean-Benoit Pilet), the purpose of this paper is to investigate the concrete practice of political representation through the observation of MEPs’ activities in their constituency. This paper will investigate the scope, the practice and the pitfalls of MEPs constituency work and reflect it based on the current theories of representation. In addition, by investigating day-to-day contacts between citizens and their MEPs, this paper will offer a new perspective in the debate about the democratic deficit of EP (Farrel and Scully 2007; Clark and Rohrschneider 2009) and EU institutions (Moravcsik 2002; Rittberger 2003)

Mots clés: European Parliament; MEPs; Parliament; Citizens

Domaines: Science politique; Sociologie

Corentin Poyet. Working at home: MEPs day-to-day practice of political representation in their constituency. Workshop: “Recent Developments in the Study of the European Parliament: new topics, approaches and findings”, College of Europe, College of Europe, Apr 2015, Bruges, Belgium. ⟨halshs-01182367⟩