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.     

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.     

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.     

Engaging the demand dynamic: promoting internal forces for reform through targeted legislative strengthening support

Institutional reform or development happens when those within the organisation want that development and are willing to commit the time, effort and necessary resources under their control to support it. This may be referred to as the will for development. Over the years, a general strategy for legislative development has emerged in which the will for development is enlisted in one or more of three ways: mapping, incentivising, and creating demand. These efforts focus on identifying the will for development independent of the legislative strengthening project itself. This paper will explore how success in supporting the budget process by the United States Agency for International Development-funded Afghanistan Parliamentary Assistance Programme enhanced and/or created the will for further development within that legislature. The paper will demonstrate how budget process support can be used to engage a broader constituency of committees and civil society organisations, creating a self-sustaining reform dynamic to be referred to as the demand dynamic.     

National parliaments as guardians of subsidiarity： A feasible task or an utopist chimera？

Ensuring a better control and respect of the principle of subsidiarity is one of the most important and innovative goals of the Treaty of Lisbon. To achieve this goal, the Treaty introduces a mechanism which, apart from checking compliance of draft legislative acts with that principle, may eventually lead a draft act to be deleted from the legislative agenda of the European Union on grounds of violation of subsidiarity. Within this mechanism, a crucial role is attributed to the national parliaments of the member states. According to Article 12 of the TEU （the Treaty on the European Union） and the provisions of the Protocol to the Treaty of Lisbon on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, in case one third of national parliaments consider a draft act not respecting the principle of subsidiarity, the commission must review the draft. Additionally, for acts to be adopted under the ordinary legislative procedure, when the simple majority of national parliaments gives reasoned opinions on the non-compliance of a proposal with subsidiarity and the commission does not amend it, the council or the parliament may block any further discussions on that proposal, if they consider it to be in violation of the principle of subsidiarity. While these provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon have the potential to ensure a better control of compliance with the principle of subsidiarity and enable national parliaments to have a stronger voice in the legislative process of the European Union, the present paper argues that several factors may considerably reduce their expected positive impact. This contribution concludes by proposing some suggestions to enhance the functioning of the subsidarity control mechanism introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon.     

Parliamentary questions as strategic party tools

This article shifts the analysis of parliamentary oversight tools to the level of the political party, asking how political parties make use of written parliamentary questions. It theorises that the use of parliamentary questions is related to the ideological and electoral competition between political parties, borrowing from theories on issue competition and negative campaigning. It provides an empirical test, using data on written questions from the lower house in the Netherlands (1994–2014). The analysis shows that parties tend to put questions to ministers whose portfolios are salient to them, in line with issue ownership theories. Moreover they ask questions of both ministers from parties that are ideologically distant and those with whom they have considerable electoral overlap in line with studies of negative campaigning.     

The opposition deficit in EU accountability: Evidence from over 20 years of plenary debate in four member states

Debates about the European Union's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has to be linked to decision‐making moments and should feature a balance between government and opposition. The recent literature discusses various partisan incentives that support or undermine these criteria, but analyses integrating these arguments are rare. This article provides a novel comparative perspective by studying the patterns of public EU emphasis in more than 2.5 million plenary speeches from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados over a prolonged period from 1991 to 2015. It documents that parliamentary actors are by and large responsive to EU authority and its exercise where especially intergovernmental moments of decision making spark plenary EU salience. But the salience of EU issues is mainly driven by government parties, decreases in election time and is negatively related to public Euroscepticism. The article concludes that national parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability and suffer from an opposition deficit in particular.     

Legislatures and civil‒military relations in the United States and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Legislatures in separation of powers systems like the US are often portrayed as having far greater capabilities and willingness to change defence policy than are parliaments in Westminster systems. This paper uses principal?agent models and hypotheses on legislative will to review the role of defence committees in the US Congress and Britain’s parliament during each country’s most recent, significant change in civil?military relations. Congressional committees drafted the 1986 Goldwater?Nichols Act over the objections of the president, fundamentally changing US civil?military relations. We would expect the British House of Commons to be at the opposite end of the spectrum, unable and unwilling to act without the prime minister’s blessing. At first glance, this is indeed what happened during Britain’s 2011 Defence Reform effort. Parliament took no concrete, independent action. A closer examination, however, suggests that parliamentary committees helped set the agenda for the 2011 reforms. These results point to the need to carefully assess both legislative capabilities and will when examining the role of legislatures in foreign policy, as well as the indirect means by which parliaments affect security policy.     

Towards political integration in Europe: the involvement of national parliaments in European Union politics and policy-making

This article provides an overview of the life of the European Union over a period that has witnessed a number of historical international and institutional developments, and provides a politico-juridico-historical perspective on its growth. The article aims to examine the role of national parliaments in relation to increasing European legislative powers. The European Union is using these powers to ensure that non-European-Union states accept its rules as universal standards. At the same time, European foreign policy has expanded remarkably, reflecting its more prominent international role. The European Parliament is the world's first directly elected transnational parliament. In recent decades, the principles of human rights, peace, and democracy have reflected the deeply embedded values at the core of European integration since its inception, determining the evolution of the European Union from international actor to a model of democratization: a model promoting not only respect for human rights, but also democracy and peace, which have become concrete goals steering the European Union foreign policy.     

Challenging Executive Dominance in European Democracy

Executive dominance in the contemporary EU is part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far‐going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents – even for parliaments. Beyond a deconstruction exercise on the nature and location of EU executive power and secretive working practices, this article focuses on the challenges facing parliaments in particular. It seeks to reconstruct a more pro‐active and networked role of parliaments – both national and European – as countervailing power. In this vision parliaments must assert themselves in a manner that is true to their role in the political system and that is not dictated by government at any level.