A critical juncture ? The 2004 European Elections and the making of a supranational elite

This article considers the emergence of a cohesive political elite within the European Parliament. Moving from a short review of the literature and drawing on some preliminary data, the paper discusses alternative hypotheses to explain the recruitment and career pattern of MEPs and introduces a typology of members. Afterwards, the paper compares representatives of the new EU member states with the ‘pioneer parliamentarians’ elected in 1979 and with their colleagues elected in the 15 countries of the ‘old’ European Union. Signs of a new pattern of European political career appear to be emerging, thus providing a new possible set of explanatory hypotheses about the evolution of European Union representatives. † This article is a preliminary result of the work developed on MEPs' cross-national convergence in the context of the network EurElite, a project sponsored by the European Science Foundation. We want to thank the other members of the EurElite task force on MEPs, Stefaan Fiers, Ulrik Kjaer and Michael Rush, as well as the two directors of EurElite, Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta, for their valuable comments. We also would like to thank our colleagues from Central-Eastern Europe for providing the available data for the ACC-10 MEPs: Witek Betkiewicz (Poland), Béla Keszegh (Hungary and Slovakia), Mindaugas Kuklys (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), and Lukás Linek (Czech Republic). Stefan Jahr has also been involved in the definition of the codebook and in the process of data elaboration. © 2005, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.