The paper, co-authored with O. Costa, will explore the ambiguities of parliamentary representation at the EU level concerning the territorial dimension of the European mandate. It will focus on the French MEPs as France combines several interesting elements with regards to territorial representation: seating in the EP that is supposed to represent the EU citizens, French MEPs are elected at the national level on regional lists. The paper will thus try to determine how French MEPs deal with their relations with the territorial dimension of their mandate. A first part will concentrate on their views about representation and more particularly, their focus of representation, i.e. the territorial level or group they view themselves as representing. The second part will then analyze the relation between their focus of representation and their role orientations.
The paper is based on the data on the attitudes and opinions of the French MEPs collected in the framework of the legipart research project (Costa & Dri 2010).
