This chapter will analyse texts of parliamentary questions for written answer tabled in by all MPs during the last completed session of the national parliaments of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Our research design is based on a dual comparison (a) between countries and (b) between CIO MPs and a matching sample of other MPs within each country. Since quantitative analyses of speeches and other forms of substantive representation are extremely rare and patchy for European parliaments, even the descriptive character of the chapter will cover completely new ground both in relation to individual countries as well as with regard to the comparisons. Given the differences in language and semantics, the chapter will start by identifying the methodological problems arising from the quantitative analysis of legislative speeches across languages and institutional contexts. Subsequently we will present the results of (a) country-specific topic models, (b) of sentiment analyses comparing CIO and non-CIO MPs in relation to policy issues pertaining to immigrants and citizens of immigrant origin and (c) analyses of influential ‘separating words’ in parliamentary questions, i. e. terms that are highly predictive for particular populations and sub-populations. The findings will be presented by using standard techniques of visualizing differences between legislators and countries. Where the number of MPs and size of the text corpus allows, these comparisons will be refined by accounting for differences across stages of the parliamentary cycle and the career cycle as well as party affiliation of MPs with a CIO background. In addition the chapter will look at the extent to which policy areas unrelated to CIOs are framed in terms of migration and integration when MPs with and without CIO background are compared.
