Hannah Pitkin (1967) conceptualised representation as responsiveness, or the match between voters' preferences and representatives' activities during policy-making. This lucid conceptualisation requires the retrieval of activities relevant to decision-making and relatively unconstrained by party strategic considerations. Are written questions submitted by Members of the European Parliament relatively unconstrained and pertinent to policy-making in the EU? The paper will answer this research question in three stages: first, through a qualitative comparison of rules of procedure concerning the various parliamentary activities available to MEPs; second, through a negative binomial model comparing the effect of institutional constraints faced by MEPs on their usage of parliamentary activities; and third, through content analysis where a supervised classification method will be applied to each written question submitted during the EP7 to evaluate whether policy-making or distributional concerns are prevalent. Findings are reassuring concerning the possibility of using written questions to operationalize MEP's performance in substantive representation.
