European Parliament member's activism: the case of the Baltic States.

Abstract

The main aim of this thesis is to discern the activism of the European Parliament Members (MEPs) representing the Baltic states, with a secondary aim to find out the differences of activism between European Union founding states and Central-Eastern European countries that joined the union in 2004. The argumentation for the research stems from finding out, which of the MEPs representing any of the Baltic states can be considered the most active, as a common misconception in modern Europe is that MEPs are inactive in their day-to-day duties in the European Parliament. Additionally, the secondary aim attempts at comparing the aforementioned country groups to see whether or not countries with greater experience in the union are more active than relative newcomers. The research utilizes 9 different parameters that depict parliamentary activities in the EP by which activism of each MEP is measured in this research. To display the activism of both countries and individual MEPs, a suite of methods is designed to discern the relevant results. The research includes the collection of required data on every MEP currently serving in the current European Parliament that is later used for necessary calculations. The results for both the analysis of countries and Baltic MEPs are gathered in several graphs and relevant conclusions are drawn from them. Based on the available results, the Baltic MEPs are further classified into two divisions of parliamentary activities inspired by Bíró-Nagy (2016).