Europe for All or Europe for Some? Parliamentary Representation in National EU Politics

Studying politicians’ representative roles and foci of representation has only recently come back into fashion in legislative studies. The question of whom it is that national members of parliament (MPs) represent has extensively been dealt with in the national (electoral) context. Surprisingly, scholars have so far neglected the influence of the European Union (EU) multilevel system of governance on these representative foci. Given the growing interdependence of EU member states coupled with the elite-nature of European integration on the one hand, we would expect national MPs to claim Europe to be in the interest of a common collective citizenry - be it national or European. The increased politicization of EU issues within both the parliamentary arena and the general publics in member-states coupled with growing attention to redistributive questions on the other hand, would lead us to assume them speaking on behalf of specific (group) interests. Put differently, they may either claim to be responsible for the needs of a collective as a whole or responsive to the demands of particular interests. Against this background, this paper investigates whom national MPs claim to represent when they debate EU politics in parliament, and under which conditions they claim to represent a common collective of citizens rather than particular interests only. Theoretically, four ideal typical patterns of representation are conceptualized from a rational neo-institutional perspective. Empirically, this paper focuses on the Constitutional and Lisbon Treaty as well as the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), employing a Representative Claims Analysis (RCA) of plenary debates in Austria, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom.