Interrogating the Opposition? The Use of Blue-Card Questions in the European Parliament

In many parliaments around the world, legislators can use interventions to spontaneously react to their opponents' views during the debate. Such interventions, called blue-card questions, have been introduced in the European Parliament in 2009 to increase interaction during plenary debates. However, we currently know little about how Members of the European Parliament use these blue-card questions given that in contrast to national parliaments, there is no formal government and opposition in the European Parliament. Instead, governing coalitions tend to form on an issue-by-issue basis. Based on an original data set of all 5,496 blue-card questions and answers in the 8th European Parliament (2014-2019) I demonstrate that obtaining a network from interactions in parliamentary debate can further our understanding of government-opposition dynamics and the role of parliamentary interventions. Using a temporal exponential random graphs model (TERGM) for longitudinal network analysis, I find that legislators rarely interrupt the debate following contributions from peers of their own political group. Instead, more than 90% of all blue-card interjections are targeted towards speeches by members of the opposing camp, providing evidence that the blue-card interactions follow the patterns of the governing coalitions. In addition to contributing to our understanding of party competition in the European Parliament, the findings also provide insights into the interaction of its legislators and the dynamics of legislative debate.