Oral Questions in the European Parliament: A Network Analysis

Jäckle Sebastian () and Metz Thomas
Additional contact information
Jäckle Sebastian: Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
Metz Thomas: Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Statistics, Politics and Policy, 2019, vol. 10, issue 2, 87-113

Abstract: Internal working structures within parliaments are notoriously hard to capture. While analyses based on bill co-sponsorship work for the US Congress, this approach is not feasible in many parliamentary systems. Drawing on data from the European Parliament’s legislative term of 2009–2014 this article shows that parliamentary questions can be another option. Members of the European Parliament may demand information from the Council or the Commission through oral questions. We take advantage of the fact that these questions are signed by their authors and construct a social network of members of the Parliament that support each other’s oral questions. This allows investigating how members and their groups and committees cooperate to control both Council and Commission. Our approach helps to map out the internal structure of the party groups and explore which forces shape the global network. We find that cooperation is mostly driven by party group membership with ALDE, Green/EFA, and GUENGL turning out as the most cohesive groups while SD is internally rather loosely connected. The second strongest clustering characteristic is a legislators’ native country.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2019-0004 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:10:y:2019:i:2:p:87-113:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/spp/html

DOI: 10.1515/spp-2019-0004

Access Statistics for this article

Statistics, Politics and Policy is currently edited by Joel A. Middleton

More articles in Statistics, Politics and Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().