Quotas impact not just political spaces, but also the careers of the politicians that serve within them. The addition of quotas can disrupt the professional lives of politicians at all phases of their careers: they create new opportunity structures for political aspirants, spread contagiously within a party system, and impact pipelines between multiple levels of office. Using an individual-level analysis that embeds individual political careers within a systemwide context, we examine how gender quotas affect the career paths of close to 2,300 members of the European Parliament from 230 different national political parties over the institution’s full elected history, 1979-2019. Our findings demonstrate how the addition of quotas changes the pool of political aspirants that parties can recruit from, the background characteristics that they prioritize in candidate selection across multiple levels of office, and the management of career trajectories by parties for elected politicians at all levels of the system. In so doing, we show that quotas have lifelong ramifications for politicians and the institutions that they serve, well beyond descriptive differences in a static moment following an election.

This paper explains variation in the timing of European Parliament (EP) involvement in the negotiation of international agreements. Since 2009, the EP has veto power on the conclusion of most international agreements. Although the EP rarely uses its veto power, it is involved through formal and informal means, such as resolutions. However, the timing of such involvement varies: the EP sometimes is involved in early stages, and sometimes only at the end. As the timing of the EP’s involvement likely affects its impact on the negotiations, this paper asks: under which conditions do different patterns of timing of EP involvement in the negotiation of international agreements occur? The paper examines the effect of three sets of factors on the timing of EP involvement: 1) the amount of resources available to manage EP involvement, for both the EP and the EU negotiator; 2) the values advocated by the EP that are at stake in the negotiations and 3) the salience of negotiations. The effect of these factors is tested utilizing a multinomial logistic regression, applied to a new, comprehensive dataset including the 357 agreements concluded since 2009. The results provide a comprehensive explanation of the timing of EP involvement in the negotiation of international agreements, across negotiations and policy areas. By shedding light on when the EP is involved, the paper characterizes the role(s) played by the EP post-Lisbon in these procedures. More generally, it contributes to understanding parliamentary involvement in (the making of) foreign policy.

This paper investigates the structure of politicization in the European Parliament in relations with Turkey through parliamentary written questions from 2009 until 2023 (n = 1703).

Despite the recent and rapid expansion of the EP's politicization literature, parliamentary questions remain understudied to grasp the process. However, I argue that parliamentary especially in external affairs, since the EP’s formal power is limited in external relations. Moreover, they are procedurally easy to implement, individualistic in question formulation, and decentralized regarding party discipline. MEPs put a written question if the issue is their priority if they are not satisfied with the Commission’s approach towards it and if they want to increase saliency on an issue. From this perspective, parliamentary questions coincide with the polarization, saliency, and actor expansion aspects of politicization. Therefore, parliamentary written questions are a perfect indicator of political contestation in the EP, which depicts how politicized and what structure MEPs are in given issues.

This article uses complete novel data of all parliamentary written questions related to Turkey from EP7 (2009) until the first half (2023) of EP8. Turkey has been selected as a case study since Turkey is part of several dimensions of the EP's external relations. Questions have been coded for the question title, question topic, the name of the MEP, MEP’s nationality, MEP’s national party, and MEP’s European Party Groups. This variable enables a comprehensive analysis of the “politics” of the written questions as it has been able to perceive a correlation between the EP’s multilevel politics.

This study presents two main contributions to the literature. Firstly, from a methodologic perspective, this is one of the first attempts to use parliamentary questions to grasp the politicization of the MEPs. Parliamentary questions strongly correlate with MEP’s priorities and political preferences, making them an excellent tool for connecting political contestation in the EP’s external relations. Second, it brings a new concept of “nationality-dominant politicization” to explain the EP’s politics toward Turkey. Even though Greek and Cypriot MEPs dominate the parliamentary questions to oversee and influence the Commission, political contestation occurs in the content of the questions. Right-wing parties tend to focus on bilateral relations and crises. At the same time, leftist MEPs are still concerned about human rights violations, even among Greek and Cypriot MEPs. Therefore, even though national politics affect the EP, political contestation takes place within MEP with centrist-extremist cleavage.

Members of the European Parliament are given significant resources to hire staff to assist them in their work. Broadly speaking, they can hire two types of staffers, either parliamentary assistants, who help them with their work in the Parliament or local assistants, whose job is to keep in touch with constituents and respond to their queries. Both kinds of staff are financed over the same budget and, therefore MEPS face a trade-off, as they must make a choice in how they allocate their resource between these two kinds of assistants The aim of this paper is to explain this choice by examining what factors explain the proportion of staff MEPs dedicate to each activity as dependent variables. Particularly, this paper tests whether the MEPs' choices can be explained by functional reason (the task it conducts within the EP or the different necessities of committee works) or by the search for personal gain (notably re-election). Beyond contributing to a better understanding of the EP functioning and of MEPs' motivation, this research also has important implications. Indeed, if MEPS use their public funds for tasks other than those for which they are intended, that is, for personal reasons, this would raise questions in terms of the legitimacy of those funds, especially if it gives them an advantage over their electoral competitors.