From Constituency to Continent? Measuring the Shift of Territorial Representational Focus in MEPs' Parliamentary Activity (1994-2024)

As a supranational legislative institution, the European Parliament (EP) is known to put a particular pressure on its members (MEPs) when fulling their mandates. MEPs are famously known for being “the servants of two masters”, i.e. they must serve the interests of their domestic (s)electorate from the territorial districts they were elected in, while being loyal to their European party groups in the EP. This situation is particularly challenging when MEPs face conflicting interests from competing principals. Yet, this situation is not specific to the EP but rather reflects the inevitable “compounded representation” at the heart of federal political systems. In these systems, there is a trade-off balancing “self-rule” with “shared rule” as federal systems present parliamentarians with a classic representational dilemma: standing up for their specific constituency versus addressing the broader interests of the wider polity. This research note analyses how MEPs balance this compounded representation in their parliamentary activity. Because of the continuous extension of EU policy-making powers over the last decades (Maastricht 1993, Amsterdam 1999, Lisbon 2009), along with the institutionalization and empowerment of the EP in the decision-making processes, this analysis is of particular interest for both scholars of European and legislative studies. Have MEPs been shifting their territorial focus as the influence of the EP was increasing? On the opposite, do they remain foremost representatives of national interests? To answer these questions, we introduce a novel conceptualization of territorial representational focus, operationalizing it as a spectrum ranging from localized (constituency-focused) to polity-wide (supranational European) representation. Drawing on a comprehensive dataset spanning three decades (1994–2024) and encompassing the careers of 3,654 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who tabled 187,612 parliamentary questions, we present the first systematic measurement of territorial representational focus in parliamentary activity. For that task, we leverage several natural language processing (NLP) techniques, transformer-based models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities. Our findings reveal how territorial focus in MEPs’ questions evolved over time while varying across policy domains, EPGs, countries and MEPs’ seniority. Overall, our approach lays the groundwork for future research by offering a new empirical tool to study territorial representational tensions in MEPs’ parliamentary behaviour.