Politicizing Europe in Parliament. What Makes Parties Raise EU Salience in the Plenary?

Politicizing Europe in parliament. What makes parties raise EU salience in the plenary?

To what extent and under which conditions do members of parliament chose to raise the salience of EU affairs in parliament, by debating it in the plenary? This question structures our cross-sectional and longitudinal comparison of EU salience in plenary parliamentary debates. We use automated content analysis that allows for the handling of the huge amount of data that national parliaments in the European Union increasingly make available digitally online. We include data from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados in the period 1991-2015. This allows us to isolate: 1) the effects of efficacy and political competition by including small and big political parties, representing government and opposition, in small and big Member States; 2) the effects of institutional incentives by including parliaments with strong and weak formal powers in EU affairs representing both full Euro zone members and members with opt outs; and 3) the effects of wider EU politicization, by including member states with more and less Eurosceptic populations and the temporal inclusion of the euphoria surrounding the Maastricht Treaty, the launch of the Euro and Eastern Enlargement.