Party, Nation, or Committee? Drivers of Legislative Oversight in the European Parliament’s Economic Dialogues

Authors: Adina Maricut-Akbik and Marta Migliorati, Hertie School, Berlin In the socioeconomic governance of the European Union (EU), economic and fiscal issues have often been prioritized at the expense of social aspects. The asymmetry between economic and social issues has been both substantive (in terms of the importance assigned to each field) and institutional (in respect to the centrality in EU affairs of certain actors like the Eurogroup or the Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs). In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the asymmetry between economic and social aspects in EU governance is also reflected in the concerns of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in parliamentary questions. Since the euro crisis, the European Parliament has organized regular Economic Dialogues with the Commission, the Council, and individual Member States, which allow MEPs to raise oral questions on a variety of issues. We particularly focus on the Economic Dialogues with the Commission as the locus where MEPs are most likely to raise both economic and social questions in relation to policy coordination in the European Semester. Based on 20 Economic Dialogues which took place during 2012-2019, we examine how different characteristics of MEPs (political group affiliation, nationality, membership in a certain committee) are correlated with their likelihood to ask economic or social policy questions to the Commission. Our analysis contributes to the literature on the dominance of economic issues in EU governance as well as to studies on legislative oversight by the European Parliament more broadly.