The Relevance of Regional Positions of MEPs: Against Methodological Nationalism in European Studies

The European Parliament (EP)’s formal authority has considerably expanded since 1979. As a result, scholars in European studies increasingly have increasingly paid attention to the emergence of a European political class, along with the empowerment of the supranational national assembly. Since Scarrow’s seminal work on MEPs’ political ambition and career in the late 1990s, recent studies have contributed to this literature. They have notoriously extended the empirical scope to new Member States, while more systematically assessing the evolution over legislative terms. Nonetheless, this literature on the EP suffers from a notorious bias, namely “methodological nationalism”. This issue is far from being limited to European studies, and it has been repeatedly identified in legislative and parliamentary studies. Hence, the latter literature has now established the relevance – or even predominance – of regional political arenas in multiple European countries. This question is even more pertinent for the study of the EP as the largest delegations of MEPs precisely originate from regionalised or federal countries. To address this gap, this paper presents an empirical analysis of about 1.250 MEPs career patterns over seven legislative terms (1979-2014) from seven regionalised countries and federations in the EU (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the UK, which represent about half of all MEPs who ever serve in the EP). The empirical analysis shows that ignoring regional positions conduct to the mischaracterisation of a substantial number of MEPs’ career patterns. This finding has important consequences when political experience is used as a key factor explaining MEPs’ legislative behaviour. It thus encourages other scholars to more systematically include the regional level, against “methodological nationalism”.