SPARK's Marie Bruyndonckx discusses the European Parliament’s knowledge base at the University of Glasgow

On 27 April, Marie Bruyndonckx, doctoral researcher within SPARK, contributed to the PGR Conference on ‘Understanding Developments in Politics and International Studies’ at the University of Glasgow. She presented a paper on the European Parliament’s health policy knowledge base.

The paper focused on who the EP invites to its committee hearings and cites in its studies on COVID-19 and cancer issues. Using a comparative quantitative approach, Marie mapped the gender, geographical, and organisational affiliations of those knowledge sources. In a next step, she assessed how representative this knowledge base is of the EU population. Findings revealed male dominance and underrepresentation of member states that joined the EU from 2004 onwards.

Marie is very grateful for the opportunity to share her findings with her peers and for the feedback she received. She is motivated to use this feedback to improve her analysis and the paper. 

You can find the slides for the presentation here.

Image: The Cloisters, University of Glasgow. Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash