Intergroups in the European Parliament: Informational Capital of MEPs

This paper provides a novel insight into the informal dimension of parliamentary politics by examining European Parliaments’ Intergroups. Given the continuous empowerment of the EP throughout the last decades, making it a key player within the EU institutional system, as well as the increasing importance of the informal dimension of EU politics (see e.g. Christiansen & Neuhold, 2012; Christiansen & Piattoni, 2004), it is more important than ever to look into informal arrangements through which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) may shape and organise their work and thus, to study parliamentary organisation beyond the formal structure of the Parliament. Thereby, Intergroups constitute informal cross-party/cross-committee groupings which gather MEPs from different political groups, parliamentary committees and member states as well as representatives of civil society and other EU institutions in their meetings. The 7th EP (200914) had 27 officially recognized Intergroups recording up to 140 MEPs as their members. Drawing on political sociology in its conceptual framework analyzing the EP as transnational political field, as well as on rich, original empirical data from interviews with MEPs, representatives of political groups and civil society, this contribution shows how MEPs acquire and mobilise informational capital through their Intergroup interactions to shape parliamentary practice (e.g., consensus and coalition building) and organisation at the supranational level. Combining a fairly new research agenda in EU studies with fresh empirical data on the informal dimension of parliamentary politics, this paper makes valuable contributions to research on EP Intergroups, MEPs’ behaviour beyond voting and the EP’s internal organisation, as well as to the current discussion on how a Bourdieu-inspired political sociology can be applied in EU studies.