EU issue-salience in regional parliaments: Europeanization, party politics, or regional context?

The strengthening of member states’ parliaments in the EU policy process as introduced with the Lisbon Treaty has led scholars to proclaim a wave of Europeanization in national, but also regional parliaments. At the same time, EU affairs have become a polarized and highly contested issue in domestic party competition in several member states – not least in the context of a steady expansion of EU competences and the emergence of various EU-wide (sectoral) crisis strongly affecting not only the national but also the subnational level of governance. Taking account of these developments, to what extend do members of parliament from the regional level actively address EU affairs in their everyday parliamentary work in order to seek information on or get involved in EU policy proposals and exercise control over their government on these issues? This paper addresses this question focusing on the instrument of written questions as a traditional and well-established practice of parliamentary work. To put it differently, the paper aims to examine the degree of EU issue-salience in the parliamentary arena at the regional political level. In particular, it aims to answer the question of whether EU-issue salience in regional parliaments is a general symptom of an assumed process of a Europeanization of these institutions or whether it is rather driven by party-political dynamics. Studies on EU issue-salience in the parliamentary arena so far mainly focus on national parliaments. The aim of the proposed paper is to address the so-called third level of governance in the EU, i.e. the subnational or regional level. Do we observe the same patterns here or does regional context play a particular role in that respect? We measure EU issue-salience by analysing the share of written questions on EU affairs out of all written questions posed at different points in time. By comparing the use of written questions by members of regional parliaments in selected sub-national parliaments of Germany, Austria and Spain, we attempt to capture a wide range of regional and national characteristics in our research.