Electoral Communication: What (De)Motivates Parliamentarians to Communicate EU Affairs?

Europeans continue to send their representatives to regional and national parliaments, but the capabilities of these parliamentary agents in representing their citizens have been increasingly limited within the European integration. This gives rise to a lively debate on the role of parliaments in the EU, so far disproportionately concentrating on national parliaments as institutions and their government-related functions. This paper widens our understanding of parliamentary function of communication in EU affairs to individual parliamentarians as well as deepening it to the members of regional parliaments. There is little systematic knowledge on communicative behaviour of these representatives in EU affairs. Do members of regional and national parliaments communicate EU affairs to their citizens, or do they simply ignore such supranational affairs? Arguing that communication is not only a normative aspect of representative democracy but also a strategic behaviour of legislators competing for re-election, this paper explores the electoral conditions that (de)motivate parliamentary agents to involve in communicating EU affairs. Therefore, the paper shares the theoretical assumption that parliamentarians are rational actors and that they behave strategically in performing their parliamentary functions but disagrees with the assertion in the early literature that communicating EU affairs is irrational for re-election seeking parliamentarians. Drawing on an original field experiment on representatives in five regional and five national parliaments, the paper introduces much-needed hard data for EU-related parliamentary behaviour at the level of individual parliamentarians. The experiment finds that parliamentarians, when contacted by citizens about EU affairs, portray significantly different behavioural patterns. This begs for a systematic explanation. There are over ten thousand legislators in regional and national parliaments in the EU, and this paper shows why we need more than a quick cost and benefit analysis across the board.