Measuring salience in EU legislative politics

Abstract:
To describe and explain legislative politics in the European Union and to assess its democratic quality we need to measure the political importance (salience) of legislative proposals. The existing literature uses several indicators to measure salience. This article compares measures of salience based on three types of data source (expert interviews, text analysis and media coverage) using a large number of legislative proposals that cover a variety of policy fields and types of proposal. Different measures of salience often do not yield similar values.