Territorial Group Appeals in a Supranational Parliament: Institutional Empowerment and the Rescaling of Parliamentary Focus in the European Parliament (1994–2024)

The European Parliament (EP), a central institution of the European Union’s multilevel democracy, confronts a core representational dilemma: how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) articulate the interests of social groups they represent while operating between national electorates and a supranational legislature. Building on the growing literature on group appeals – defined as explicit references that link political actors to specific categories of people – this article examines how MEPs mobilize group appeals in their parliamentary activity. In a supranational setting, group appeals serve not only as instruments of vote seeking and representative claim-making, but also as mechanisms through which MEPs signal their position within overlapping territorial and institutional arenas. We argue that group appeals by MEPs are inherently territorialized: when appealing to social, economic, or cultural groups, legislators simultaneously locate these groups at different territorial scales, ranging from local and national constituencies to European-wide publics. The EP thus provides a unique context to study how institutional empowerment and deepening integration have been reshaping the territorial scope of group-based representation. We expect that this institutional evolution shifted MEPs’ territorial group appeals from national to European focus – albeit with some variations according to party group affiliations (Eurosceptics versus mainstream EPGs) as well as member states’ membership and power role (periphery versus central countries). Empirically, the article introduces a novel longitudinal measurement of MEPs’ group appeals with a specific focus on their territorial group appeals scope between 1994 and 2024. Using named entity recognition processing for territorial focus and transformer-based models for mention of group appeals, we classify 187,617 parliamentary questions according to both the type of group mentioned and the territorial level at which these groups are located.