The Determinants of Issue Attention Among Members of the European Parliament

As the European Parliament (EP) gained increasing power in the EU policy-making process over the last decades and became a co-legislator on equal terms with the Council of the European Union, decision-making also became more contentious. Because political competition is largely played around policy issues, understanding the determinants of issue attention among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) is important to make sense of the change in patterns of political competition in the EP. We analyse the determinants of issue attention in the European Parliament using a novel dataset of 200 000 written questions lodged by MEPs between 1994-2024, coded by their policy content. Written questions are an ideal activity to observe MEPs behaviour: contrary to other activities, in presenting written questions MEPs are free to choose virtually any topics. We first provide an aggregate analysis of patterns and contents of issue attention in the EP, and their stability and change over time. We then turn to the analysis of the determinants of issue attention by MEPs. We show that party groups and national delegations have statistically significant effects in shaping the policy agendas of MEPs, but such effects only explain a relatively small share of issue attention. To account for more of the variation in issue attention, we finally turn to exploring the relevance of individual-level MEP characteristics.