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.