Tribunes Versus Experts: An Analysis Of the Romanian MEPs

The article proposes an original framework for analyzing all the questions addressed to the European Council and Commission by the thirty-three Romanian Members of the European Parliament (EP) in the first year of their European mandate. We rely on a complex dataset that includes the parliamentarians’ age, gender, previous experience in the European legislature, position on the party list, when elected and the party national status (in opposition or government). The nearly 400 interpellations are content-analyzed and then multivariate statistical techniques are applied in order to explain first, the questions’ frequency and second, their connections to topics related either to Romania or to the MEPs’ committee work. Our results reflect the Romanian MEPs’ adaptation to the major patterns of interpellation in the EP, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of re-election seeking motivations, as well as a rather novel gender-related difference in parliamentary behaviour.