Mapping the Treatment of the European Union in the National Parliamentary Arena Empirically

The treatment of the European Union (EU) in the national parliamentary arena forces governments and parties to articulate and defend their EU-related policies. Transparent government and party policies are necessary, albeit not sufficient, for the functioning of electoral democracy in Europe. Yet, we continue to lack solid empirical information on how much, in what way, and why the EU matters in the parliamentary arena. Existing datasets only cover short time periods, selected parliamentary activities or rely on ambiguous raw data. They also all lack a domestic benchmark against which we can assess whether parliamentary engagement with the EU is stronger or weaker than what we should reasonably expect. We present first insights from our data collection on the treatment of the EU in parliamentary plenary sessions, which so far covers four countries (AT, DE, ES, NL) and ten years (2002-2012). Our data collection allows us to map what kind of EU-related topics parliaments cover, who initiates those topics, how intensely they are debated, and how frequently compared to domestic politics.