Political groups over national parties: Measuring the Europeanization of the political arena through MEPs’ Twitter interactions

Abstract

The question of the democratic character of the European Union (EU) has been a center-point of decades of political research. An important critique suggests that the development of the European political arena is still incomplete, with European parliamentarians primarily orienting themselves to national issues and politicians, implying a problematic mismatch between the political arena and their policy jurisdiction. Research has however been limited by methodological difficulties of capturing the level of Europeanization of the political arena. This paper contributes a novel method for measuring Europeanization by studying interactions between the European Parliament to their national parliamentarians on Twitter in 15 EU countries. Contrary to expectations in the literature, we find substantial Europeanization of the political arena. The level of Europeanization furthermore varies greatly across countries and political groups. This has important implications on the debate on EU’s democratic deficit, as communication across different levels of parliament indicates democratic debate.