16:00 - 17:30
Panel Session 2
Room: Zoom
Moderator/s:
Tim Haughton
Interrogating the Opponent? The Use of Blue-Card Questions in the European Parliament
Verena Kunz
University of Mannheim, Mannheim

In many parliaments around the world, legislators can use interventions to spontaneously react to their opponents' views during the debate. Such interventions, called blue-card questions, have been introduced in the European Parliament in 2009 to increase interaction during plenary debates. However, we currently know little about how Members of the European Parliament use these blue-card questions given that in contrast to national parliaments, there is no formal government and opposition in the European Parliament. Instead, governing coalitions tend to form on an issue-by-issue basis. To further our understanding of the role that blue-card questions play with regard to government-opposition dynamics, I perform a network analysis based on a novel data set of all 5,496 blue-card questions and answers in the 8th European Parliament (2014-2019). The preliminary results show that the blue-card interactions follow the patterns of the governing coalitions. In addition to contributing to our understanding of party competition in the European Parliament, the findings also provide insights into the interaction of its legislators and the dynamics of legislative debate.


Reference:
Th-P2-04
Session:
EU Politics
Presenter/s:
Verena Kunz
Topic:
EU Politics
Presentation type:
Oral presentation
Room:
Zoom
Moderator/s:
Tim Haughton
Date:
Thursday, 18 June
Time:
16:45 - 17:00
Session times:
16:00 - 17:30

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