Conclusion: regional parliaments – a distinct role in the EU?

ABSTRACT

Regional parliaments can shape EU policy-making via a range of domestic and European channels. In the context of a renewed interest in the subnational level, this article aims to address three core questions: have regional parliaments really been empowered by the early warning system provisions? Which factors explain differences in strength and mobilisation? Finally, what kind of a role do regional parliaments play in EU policy-making today, now that they have had several years to react to the trend towards multilevel parliamentarism? The authors argue that regional parliaments do indeed have the potential to contribute a distinct perspective to EU policy-making, even if their current level of activity is still low. Their distinctive territorial focus sets them apart from national parliaments. Their level of activity still varies greatly between parliaments depending on a number of factors.     

Spokes in the wheel. European affairs and the parliamentary administration of German Landtage

ABSTRACT

Over the last decades, regional parliaments were considered to play a minor role in European affairs. Not only was the salience of the EU low at the regional level, but politicians elected into these bodies also often lacked vested interests and capacities to become more involved in dealing with complex multi-level questions. After the constitutional strengthening of regional parliaments in EU decision-making, this paper considers one under-researched aspect behind the growing appetite of regional parliaments to become more involved in the scrutiny of EU affairs: the role of unelected parliamentary officials. Based on qualitative interviews in 12 German regional parliaments, the authors highlight how regional parliaments exert control over their governments and what role horizontal administrative networks among parliamentary staff play in the engagement of regional parliaments in EU affairs.     

Regional parliaments questioning EU affairs

ABSTRACT

Since the Treaty of Lisbon, the desire of parliaments to adapt to their new powers has led to a new wave of Europeanisation. However, the early warning system (EWS) and the political dialogue with the Commission constitute only a small part of parliamentary scrutiny for regional parliaments, which still largely rely on traditional tools such as mandates, debates and questions. Therefore, this paper studies a traditional mechanism of scrutiny, parliamentary questions, in order to understand how they can be used in an EU context. The study shows that Europeanisation is progressing slowly. Interestingly, the vast majority of MPs who ask EU-related questions are not members of the European Affairs Committee. In addition, questions focus primarily on the implementation stage rather than the policy-making stage. Finally, the content of parliamentary questions shows that regional parliaments have a distinctive territorial approach to EU affairs.     

Belgian regional parliaments and the European Union: an analysis of parliamentary scrutiny in agricultural and environmental policies

ABSTRACT

Drawing on qualitative case studies of two specific European decision-making processes in the agricultural and environmental sectors, this paper discusses how and why Belgian regional parliaments activated (or not) their control mechanisms to scrutinise their respective regional ministers. The findings show that parliamentary scrutiny of the agricultural and environmental policy fields has undergone a process of institutional and behavioural Europeanisation. Belgian regional parliaments rely mostly on classical parliamentary tools aimed at gathering information and, to a lesser extent, on constraining instruments aimed at influencing their government. Rather than trying to influence the EU negotiations, the MPs try to assess the potential impact of the reforms on their regional policy sectors. The findings also demonstrate that domestic media coverage and political salience of the EU negotiation associated with important implementing powers of regional parliaments have a positive effect on the level of scrutiny conducted by Belgian regional assemblies.     

To have a voice in the matter: A comparative study of the Swedish and Danish European committees

This article deals with the issue of how the national parliaments might be strengthened in order to decrease the democratic deficit within the EU. It examines the parliamentary European committees in the Danish and Swedish Parliaments and concludes that their potential to influence and control their respective governments’ EU policies mainly depends on the Government's parliamentary base and opportunities for legislative influence open to parliamentary oppositions. Moreover, it examines various organisational aspects of the European committees, including distribution of tasks and internal co‐ordination within the Parliament, at what stage in the decision‐making process the European Committee and the Parliament are involved and information management. With some conspicuous exceptions, Denmark and Sweden have chosen the same organisational arrangements for dealing with EU affairs both in the Parliament as a whole and, specifically, in the European committees. The principal conclusion is that the European committees in Sweden and Denmark are effective means for giving the national parliaments a voice in EU matters, but the article also addresses some reforms to strengthen their positions.     

Mandating – a likely scrutiny instrument for regional parliaments in EU affairs?

ABSTRACT

Scrutinising governments lies at the heart of parliamentary activities in EU affairs. This applies to national as well as to regional parliaments, most of which possess a toolbox of scrutiny instruments, including the power to mandate, allowing for the strongest form of scrutiny vis-à-vis governments. The article investigates the existence of mandating tools in the 70 regional parliaments equipped with legislative competences in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, whose role in EU affairs has been strengthened by stipulations in the Lisbon Treaty. It is argued that mandating tools are, first, not widely used; second, they are more commonly applied in cases where national parliaments act as ‘policy shapers’ – enabling policy transfer – and if meso-level factors involving territorial politics create further incentives. In sum, the regional parliaments in six member states are still trying to find a place in the maturing EU multi-level parliamentary system.     

Parliamentary Questions,Oversight, and National Opposition Status inthe European Parliament

This study examines when and why members of the European Parliament (EP) use parliamentary questions as a form of fire alarm oversight. We argue that the multilevel nature of the EU political system allows members of the EP from national opposition parties to use parliamentary questions to alert the European Commission to governments' failures to implement EU policy. Representation in the EP provides the only avenue for such oversight for national opposition parties. Using a new sample of EP parliamentary questions, we demonstrate that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to alert the Commission to violations of EU law in their own member states. These parliamentary questions may lead the Commission to take legal action against member‐state governments.     

Keeping national parliaments informed: The problem of European legislation

Since Maastricht there has been a growing realisation in the institutions of the European Union, that the unfettered flow of information is vital to the health of the whole European project. Some moves have been made towards more transparent decision‐making, but progress has been slow and is limited by a culture which values confidentiality, particularly in intergovernmental negotiations. The free flow of information is especially important to national parliaments if they are to exercise any influence in the EU. The House of Commons Select Committee on European Legislation has recently pronounced the scrutiny system to be ‘in deep crisis’ because of chaotic decision‐making and a disregard for the rights of national parliaments. Many Westminster MPs feel frustrated by the difficulty of keeping track of EU legislation. The paper suggests that the ingredients of an improved information system already exist. A wealth of current information can be derived from EU‐related electronic databases and through direct links between the European Parliament and national parliaments. It proposes that a new current awareness service for the House of Commons, distributed via the parliamentary network and as hard copy, could focus information for MPs in a much more accessible way.     

Strategic communication of EU affairs: an analysis of legislative behaviour on Twitter

An influential literature underlines how much parliamentary communication of European Union (EU) affairs could offer to democracy in the EU. Yet members of parliaments (MPs) seem unmoved by their potential. MPs are strategic about their communication, and this study questions the suitability of EU affairs to their re-election strategies. Analysing the messages posted on Twitter by regional and national MPs from Ireland and the United Kingdom over a four-month period, this article shows that clear electoral safety and strong political responsibility increase the communication of EU affairs. This suggests that the low electoral benefits and the high political complexity of EU affairs are significant deterrents to parliamentary communication of these affairs. As a result, the voices of Eurosceptic MPs echo disproportionately louder on Twitter.     

European Parliament and Executive Federalism: Approaching a Parliament in a Semi-Parliamentary Democracy

Abstract: The European Parliament has often been understood along the lines of theories of European integration—compared to regular parliaments by Federalists or belittled as merely an international assembly by intergovernmentalists. This paper proposes an understanding of the European Parliament not along theories about what the EU should become, but what it is and surely will continue to be, that is a very distinct federal structure. The European Parliament is a parliament in an executive federalism—with far‐reaching consequences for its form and functions. After outlining the characteristics of this federal structure, these consequences will be demonstrated by analysing the European Parliament in contrast with two ideal types of parliaments: the working parliament, separated from the executive branch and centred around strong committees (like the US Congress), and the debating parliament, characterised by the fusion of parliamentary majority and government as well as plenary debates (like the British House of Commons). Dwelling thus on a comparison to a legislature in a non‐parliamentary federal system, like the US Congress, this paper argues that the European Parliament might best be understood as a special case of a working parliament. Finally, it will be proposed to consider the influence of executive federalism not only as fundamentally shaping the European Parliament but also as rendering the EU generally a semi‐parliamentary democracy.     

National Parliaments and EU Fiscal Integration

This article analyses the impact of the euro crisis on national parliaments and examines their response to the deepening of EU fiscal integration and the correspondent limitation of their budgetary autonomy. It argues that the sovereign debt crisis has provoked the emergence of new channels of parliamentary involvement in EU economic governance. National parliaments have acquired various rights of approval in the European Semester, strengthened the accountability of national governments, reinforced their scrutiny over budgeting, improved their access to information, and created domestic and supranational avenues for deliberation and political contestation of European integration. In these respects, they have undergone further Europeanisation. While these reforms do not outweigh the centralisation of EU powers, they represent an embryonic step in the parliamentary adaptation to the nascent EU fiscal regime. Yet they are unlikely substantially to influence EMU policy‐making processes, because of the democratic disconnect inherent in the EU's multilevel constitution.     

Regional parliamentary empowerment in EU affairs. Building an analytical framework

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the effects of the Lisbon Treaty provisions for regional parliaments in EU decentralised systems by looking at the early warning system (EWS) for subsidiarity control. It argues that the implications of this mechanism for parliamentary empowerment at the regional level should be assessed carefully and their links with political mobilisation, institutional restructuring and policy involvement in a particular context should be analysed as precisely as possible. For this reason, this article proposes a conceptual and analytical framework that allows the detection of several kinds of regional empowerment under the EWS and explains their transformative effects in different national contexts.     

Democratic legitimacy in the European Union: Fulfilling the institutional logic

The European Union's delicate institutional balance between intergovern‐mentalism and supranationalism has been the source of both the EU's successes and its problems. This balance is under scrutiny as representatives of Member States and EU institutions pursue their particular visions of democratic legitimacy in the course of the 1996–97 Intergovernmental Conference. This essay examines three competing conceptualisations of democratic legitimacy: the Gaullist view, which associates legitimacy narrowly with national sovereignty; a national culture perspective that posits a unique correspondence of national character and national parliaments; and a parliamentary view that associates legitimacy with the role played by parliaments in scrutinising the behaviour of executives, whether at national or European level. Only the last of these perspectives acknowledges that democratic legitimacy is a continuous variable rather than an all‐or‐nothing concept, and that the EU may therefore accumulate legitimacy by improving both the process and substance of policy making within the logic of existing institutional structures.     

Parliaments as changing institutions and as agents of regime change: Evolving perspectives and a new research framework

In this review, the scholarly literature dealing with the role and dynamics of parliaments as institutions that undergo change within themselves and that support and enhance change in the larger regime is considered. One central theory of scholarship dealing with parliamentary change, that of legislative institutionalisation, is examined and found wanting as an explanation of change in mature parliamentary institutions. In discussion of analyses of five instances of parliamentary change, it is shown that parliaments can change in a wide variety of contexts and conditions ‐ including such well‐established legislatures as the United States Congress after over 200 years of evolution. There is no ‘end of history’ in parliamentary change, only the possibility of sometimes startling change from what has gone before. The examination of five instances of parliamentary change also supports the thesis that parliamentary institutional change, and regime change enhanced by parliamentary change, are inexorably linked. Finally, a tentative research framework is evolved from the above analyses and proposed as a means for considering the role of parliaments as changing institutions and as institutions enhancing systemic change.     

Parliamentary Questioning in 17 European Parliaments: Some Steps towards Comparison

All democratic parliaments have some procedures to allow representatives to put questions to ministers. However, there are no two parliaments with exactly the same procedures. Cross-national comparisons are hindered by the lack of agreed-upon scientific criteria to group similar procedures, which are too often classified on the basis of their names rather than on their substantive characteristics. To overcome this problem, this article devises a typology of parliamentary questions based on relevant procedural features in 17 European countries. A ranking of parliaments according to the criteria of the effectiveness of procedures is developed and a discussion of the relationship of this ranking to the coalitional characteristics of the parliaments is provided. Finally, the article develops some tentative arguments to explain what influences the development of more or less effective questioning procedures, testing the hypothesis that countries dominated by coalition governments tend to have more effective procedures. In contrast with the authors' expectations, with regard to the countries included in the present analysis, the frequent presence of coalition government is associated with weaker procedures.     

Democratic Accountability and National Parliaments: Redefining the Impact of Parliamentary Scrutiny in EU Affairs

Abstract:  The question of strengths and weaknesses of national parliaments in EU affairs, one of the most salient in the debate on the democratic legitimacy of the EU, is generally answered by assessing formal parliamentary powers which can influence their governments' EU policy. Such an evaluation, however, is flawed: Formal mandating rights are usually incompatible with the overall logic of parliamentary systems, which explains why most national parliaments make very little use of them. Even more importantly, it unduly reduces parliamentary functions to the legislative or policy-making function. Drawing on agency theory, it will instead be argued that the functions of public deliberation and of holding the government publicly to account are at least as important and therefore need to be included in a redefined concept of parliamentary strength. In particular, the article proposes a distinction between two different elements of accountability—monitoring and political scrutiny—which recognises parliamentary majority and opposition as two distinct agents of the electorate.     

Rethinking UK Parliamentary Adaptation in EU Affairs: Devolution and Europeanisation

How national parliaments adapt to the European Union is an important debate. However, scholars often overlook the regional aspect. This is particularly so for the UK where, despite devolution since 1999, scholarship remains largely devolution-blind. It is assumed that evaluating UK parliamentary adaptation only requires assessing the work of Westminster committees. This article takes a first step towards rectifying this oversight through reconceptualising UK–EU parliamentary engagement as multi-territory, not state-centric. This is demonstrated by comparing the social construction of practices in Scotland, Wales and at Westminster since 1999. Acknowledging devolution, however, does not just require comparing practices. Additionally, the paper asks how the ideas of devolution have been taken up by actors, potentially transforming the meaning of UK engagement for them. This necessitates new approaches drawn from interpretivist and constructivist institutionalist theories. Ultimately, therefore, the paper goes further than arguing for devolution-aware research to promoting change more generally in how parliamentary adaptation is theorised.     

Constructing a New Scottish parliament for the ‘Europe of regions’: Can institutional engineering assure subsidiarity?

The creation of an elected parliament in Scotland raises questions for legislative scholars, among them how a parliamentary body representing a stateless nation within a member state of the European Union can influence and implement European legislation. One version of the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ states that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen, encouraging assemblies throughout the EU to articulate and implement their own preferences in key policy areas. Reporting findings from a survey of the Scottish parliament's first cohort of legislators, this article identifies conflicting perceptions of subsidiarity, charts how best to pursue it, and evaluates the institutional norms, rules and procedures put in place to help secure it. Data demonstrate that preferences vary by level of MSP knowledge about European policy, by party membership and by method of election. Low levels of legislator knowledge combined with internal divisiveness constitute barriers to institutional strength in the pursuit of subsidiarity.     

Canadian prime ministers in the house of commons: Patterns of intervention

This paper explores the parliamentary activity of six Canadian prime ministers from St Laurent to Mulroney. Employing Hansard, each parliamentary utterance by a prime minister from 1949 to 1993 has been coded into one of four categories: answers to questions, speeches delivered, statements made and other interventions. Voting records have also been coded. Employing this database, the analysis compares and contrasts the prime ministers in terms of their political personalities and explores the overall scope and character of prime‐ministerial activism in the House throughout the past 40 years. Canadian profiles are compared with already existing British data in order to test generalisations concerning the diminishing presence of prime ministers in parliaments in Canada and Britain.