Asking Questions in Complex Multi-Level Systems: Bringing the Party Back in

Our study examines whether and how party ideology shapes questioning behavior in the European Parliament (EP). While recent research showed that national opposition parties rely on parliamentary questions in the EP as a tool of oversight more often than national government parties, we still know very little about the content of these control activities. In fact, questions on how party ideology affects oversight behavior in multi-level structures have not been addressed as of yet. We argue that representatives are likely to predominantly focus their attention on issues at the core of their party's ideology and this should likewise be reflected in the parliamentary questions they raise. Using a new and unique data set consisting of more than 25.000 parliamentary questions from Danish MPs and Danish MEPs (1999-2009) we test our theoretical framework on party ideology based alignment of parliamentary questioning behavior on the domestic and European level.