History calling: Strengthening evidence-based politics and policymaking in the European Parliament

Abstract

Democratic parliaments require institutional memory and a sense of purpose in part derived from it. Research on the history of the European Parliament of the European Union has created three major impacts: first, to strengthen the recognition among the administrative and political leadership of the importance of understanding the institution’s history in the broader context of post-war European integration, resulting in the institutionalisation of the European Parliament History Service; second, the wide-spread understanding that research on the history of the European Parliament is relevant to its own collective identity, facilitating cooperation among its political groups and members across cultural and ideological barriers; and third, strengthening evidence-based politics and policymaking about current and future issues through the applied academic analysis of historical dynamics of previous initiatives, changing contexts, and historical trajectories, and feeding the findings to the political groups and members through a variety of events and outputs. Generating political, societal, and cultural impacts in a democratic parliament in this way crucially requires the willingness and ability of both researchers and administrative managers to understand the logics of different fields and to cross them to maximize the benefits for the institution.