"Finding Their Way: The Socialisation of Freshmen MEPs in the European Parliament"

Bale, Tim and Taggart, Paul. (2005) "Finding Their Way: The Socialisation of Freshmen MEPs in the European Parliament". In: UNSPECIFIED, Austin, Texas. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the Introduction]. Our focus so far has been on the roles orientations of the parliamentarians and in particular the extent to which their backgrounds and their interests influence the roles they take on. This project is designed to ‘capture’ the new intake of MEPs so that we can establish a benchmark to measure their subsequent socialisation and gather data on their backgrounds, interests and experiences. In order to do this, we are conducting an intensive round of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with a sample of the new intake. We are also constructing a database containing information on all the new MEPs. This paper is an attempt to provide a ‘field report’ on this on-going research into the cohort of new MEPs. This means that the paper take an unusual form; we are presenting initial rather than final findings and we are taking the opportunity of this paper to present some hypotheses that we hope to test in subsequent research. The paper has three parts: in the first part we examine the way in which the EP and parliamentary socialisation has been treated in existing literature. In the second part we turn to the research and provide a brief description of our methods. In the third section we present our typology of role orientations based on our research, before concluding with some of the implications of our typology for the study of the EP.

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