Opinion Congruence

The European Parliament has often been accused of its inability to link to European citizens. My colleague Sofia Vasilopoulou and I were interested in the extent and conditions under which the preferences of voters and their representatives align on core policy issues and traditional political dimensions. In particular, we investigated opinion congruence, which can be understood as an indicator of democratic representation.

In our 2013 publication, we examined the extent to which policy preferences between voters and MEPs align on core socio-economic and socio-cultural issues following the 2009 European elections; and what explains why some MEPs are better at representing their voters than others. We found, among other things, that MEPs belonging to right-wing and liberal parties in general tend to be closer to their voters than leftist MEPs.

In our 2021 article we studied the effect of politicization on EU representation. We analyse congruence on the left–right and pro–anti‐EU dimensions, capturing questions related to EU policy and polity, respectively. Our examination of four European Parliament elections (1999–2014) and 341 parties across 53 electoral contexts points to the limited effect of politicization upon representation. Our findings have significant implications for the study of EU politicization and representation and open up avenues for future research.

Later on, Rick Whitaker joined us in a project in which we asked how well transnational EP party groups and members of the EP (MEPs) represent their voters on the left–right and EU-integration dimensions. We use data from four waves of the European Election Studies and surveys of MEPs and show that MEPs in centrist parties tend to be closer to their voters on the left–right dimension than others, with EU positions making little difference to this. Our findings indicate the median voter tends to be more Eurosceptic than the median MEP across most centrist party groups whilst the opposite is true for the most Eurosceptic groups. These results have important implications for the study of representation and democracy in the EU.

Key publications:

Whitaker, R., Vasilopoulou, S., & Gattermann, K. (2026). A representative European Parliament? Eurosceptic MEPs and the representation of citizens’ preferences. Journal of Common Market Studies, 64(1), 3-23.

Vasilopoulou, S. & Gattermann, K. (2021). Does politicisation matter for EU representation? A comparison of four European Parliament elections. Journal of Common Market Studies, 59(3), 661-678.

Vasilopoulou, S. and Gattermann, K. (2013). Matching Policy Preferences: The Linkage between Voters and MEPs, Journal of European Public Policy, 20(4), 606-625.

Observatory of Parliaments after Lisbon

The OPAL project involved researchers from five different European universities and was funded an Open Research Area Fund (ARN-DFG-ESRC-NWO). I was member of the research team at the Jean Monnet Chair of Prof Wolfgang Wessels, Political Science Department, University of Cologne. Our research was funded by the DFG [WE 954/13-1]. This project was concluded in 2014.

Our research team was interested in the activities and strategies of national parliaments and their members beyond the domestic arena in order to influence EU policy making. With the Lisbon Treaty the EU political system has become ever more complex, but at the same more opportunities for direct impact on EU policy-making have emerged, such as the Early Warning Mechanism and inter-parliamentary co-operation. We studied the conditions under which national parliaments become active in this respect, compared their activities over time and across EU member states and evaluated their impact.

Major publications:

Gattermann, K., Högenauer, A.-L. and Huff, A. (2016). Research note: Studying a new phase of Europeanisation of national parliaments, European Political Science, 15(1), 89-107.

Gattermann, K. and Hefftler, C. (2015). Beyond Institutional Capacity: Political Motivation and Parliamentary Behaviour in the Early Warning System, West European Politics, 38(2), 305-334.

Hefftler, C. and Gattermann, K. (2015). Inter­parliamentary cooperation in the European Union: Patterns, problems and potential, in Hefftler, C., Neuhold, C., Rozenberg, O. and Smith, J. (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of National Parliaments and the European Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 94-115.

Blog post:

Gattermann, K. and Hefftler, C. (20 March 2015). Political motivation is crucial for parliamentary behaviour in the EU’s Early Warning System, Democratic Audit UK

News about the European Parliament

My PhD thesis studied the amount and content of news referring to the European Parliament as well as the professional attitudes of their producers. The main purpose of the thesis was to explain variation in the press coverage. It argued that cross-country and inter-temporal variation cannot be explained by factors internal to news production alone. Instead, national parliamentary traditions impact profoundly on the way EU parliamentary affairs are reported.

The thesis employed a mixed-methods research design. It employed a quantitative content analysis of 18 broadsheets published in six European countries – Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria – over three time periods: one is a routine period of two years between 2005 and 2007; the remaining two datasets are oriented at key issues and events over time, that is the investiture procedure of the European Commission in 1999, 2004, and 2009, as well as the SWIFT agreement in 2009/2010. In total, 3956 newspaper articles were analysed. 18 in-depth interviews with the respective Brussels correspondents and a director at the EP Directorate-General for Communication complemented the findings.

The thesis found that while the European Parliament receives regular coverage, news are selected and presented according to the interest of the audience. Hence the domestic angle prevails in the news coverage and the European Parliament’s own prominence and potential to generate conflict attract media attention more often when major issues are at stake. However, domestic relevance is not the only explanatory factor. While newsmakers also respond to varying levels of public support for EU membership, the thesis identified national parliamentary traditions as a strong external driver of European Parliament news coverage. Here, procedural characteristics and public expectations shape the amount and content of European Parliament news as well as newsmakers’ attitudes – and more significantly so with the rising powers of the Parliament.

In addition, my colleague Sofia Vasilopoulou and I studied the news visibility of MEPs in national broadsheets in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. Our study seeks to explain individual-level variation by employing an original dataset of news visibility of 302 MEPs over a period of 25 months (September 2009–September 2011) and tests the applicability of the news values and mirror theories in the context of supranational politics. The results show that political office, length of tenure and domestic party leadership have a positive effect. Legislative activities have a mixed effect on MEP news visibility. Attendance negatively affects news visibility, while non-attached MEPs receive more news coverage. In short, despite the core supranational nature of EP legislative politics, MEP news visibility primarily depends on journalists’ domestic considerations. This informs both our understanding of MEP parliamentary behaviour and journalism studies in the context of the EU.

Moreover, I conducted research into the news visibility of the Spitzenkandiaten, i.e. the top candidates for Commission President put forward by the major European party families during the 2014 European Parliament election campaigns. For this I studied broadsheet coverage in six EU countries (Ireland, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy) ten weeks prior to Election Day. The study found that all candidates, except for José Bové, received more news attention over time. The main contenders, Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz, were most visible across countries. The study also found – by comparing visibility scores to those of my study with Sofia Vasilopoulou – that the Spitzenkandidaten received more news attention during the ten weeks prior to Election Day than MEPs during 25 months of the 7^th legislative term in France, the Netherlands and Germany.

Key publications

Gattermann, K. (2011). News about the European Parliament: Patterns and Drivers of Broadsheet Coverage. PhD Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science

Gattermann, K. (2013). News about the European Parliament: Patterns and External Drivers of Broadsheet Coverage, European Union Politics, 14(3), 436-457.

Gattermann, K. and Vasilopoulou, S. (2015). Absent yet popular? Explaining news visibility of Members of the European Parliament, European Journal of Political Research, 54(1), 121-140.

Gattermann, K. (2015). Europäische Spitzenkandidaten und deren (Un-) Sichtbarkeit in der nationalen Zeitungsberichterstattung [The European Spitzenkandidaten and their (in-) visibility in national press coverage], in Kaeding, M. and Switek, N. (eds.) Die Europawahl 2014: Spitzenkandidaten, Protestparteien, Nichtwähler [The 2014 European Elections: Spitzenkandidaten, protest parties, non-voters], Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 211-222.

Gattermann, K. & Vasilopoulou, S. (2017). Eurosceptic candidate MEPs in the news: a transnational perspective. In J. Fitzgibbon, B. Leruth, & N. Startin (Eds.), Euroscepticism as a transnational and pan-European phenomenon: The emergence of a new sphere of opposition (pp. 130-146). Abingdon: Routledge.

Blog posts

Gattermann, K. (30 May 2013). European broadsheets pay regular attention to the European Parliament between EU elections, LSE European Politics and Policy Blog (EUROPP blog)

Gattermann, K. and Vasilopoulou, S. (3 March 2015). Newspapers care more about who our MEPs are than about what they do in the European Parliament, Political Studies Association Blog (PSA blog)