The effect of supranational economic constraints on MPs issue attention: the case of France

Abstract

International audience ; Research on the determinants of the issue content of parliamentary activities is recent but offers clear empirical results: opposition status, media salience and party issue ownership are the main predictors of MPs' questioning in the parliament. In this paper, we argue that integration into international markets and into the European Union should also affect issue attention by constraining national governments' abilities to influence the economy. All things being held equal, we thus expect economic integration to provide MPs incentives to deempha-size economic issues, who should then prefer to stress non-economic issues in the Parliament. To test this assumption, we selected the French case because integration within the world markets has significantly increased since the eighties, eventually providing us with a good case study. Using data from the Comparative Agenda Project (CAP) which provides oral questions and interrogations in the French Parliament from 1988 to 2007, we are able to look at the variation over time of parliamentary questioning on both economic and non-economic matters. To measure the degree of (European) economic integration