Issue competition and agenda setting in the European Parliament

Knowing the issues debated in parliament can reveal a great deal about the nature of politics in a given political system. Indeed, large part of political competition happens around policy issues. And yet to date, few academic studies provided a systematic, comprehensive reconstruction of the issues receiving attention in the European Parliament (EP) in a long-term perspective. With the aim to address this gap, we generated large datasets of the policy content of the Parliamentary Questions asked by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) covering three decades of issue competition in the EP from 1994 to 2023 – that is, from the first legislature elected after the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty to the current legislature. In this paper we analyse the policy issues discussed in the EP through the theoretical and methodological tools of the Comparative Agendas Project, which permits to provide novel insights into the study of political and policy dynamics in the EP. We focus particularly on the question how do MEPs politicise policy issues in their parliamentary activities? Whereas party cohesion in legislative activities may obscure individual preferences, MEPs are relatively free to ask parliamentary questions on virtually any topic, which makes EPQs an ideal venue for the analysis of issue politicisation. Our analysis focuses especially on how MEPs organise political competition around policy issues. We first analyse whether issue ownership or overlap prevails in party competition. We then complement the established focus on majority-opposition (party-level) dynamics, with one on individual and national-level lines: when it comes about the EP, does issue competition also happen at a (lower) level of individual MEPs as well as/or at the (higher) level of national alignments, in addition to the ‘usual’ party level?