Clawing Back Lost Powers? Parliamentary Scrutiny of the Transposition of EU Social Policy Directives in the Netherlands

Abstract

For quite some time parliaments were seen as the losers of European integration. As a reaction, several parliaments have sought to exert more control over the executive branch in EU decision-making. An alternative venue for ‘clawing back’ these lost powers is by influencing the domestic transposition of EU policies. Surprisingly, this opportunity for greater parliamentary involvement has not received much scholarly attention. Under what conditions do the parties in parliament engage in ex post scrutiny over transposition? To shed light on this question, this article provides a detailed study of scrutiny by the Dutch parliament over the transposition of two social policy directives, investigating four hypotheses regarding vote-seeking, policy-seeking and office-seeking incentives for parliamentary oversight. The analysis shows that the ex post scrutiny that takes place can mostly be summarised as low-profile scrutiny aimed at information-gathering and position-taking, especially by opposition parties.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen and Hans Vollaard for their support and constructive feedback on previous versions of this article. We thank two anonymous West European Politics referees whose detailed comments helped us revise the article. We are grateful to Dimiter Toshkov, Oliver Treib and Philipp Genschel for providing us with insightful discussant comments and suggestions how to hone our argument. We thank Korné Boerman for research assistance.

Notes

1. This is particularly the case for directives, which must be transposed, or converted into national legislation, by the national authorities. For this reason, directives are central to this paper.

2. Similarly, De Ruiter (2013) recently asked the question under what conditions EU directives end up ‘on the national parliamentary radar’.

3. We would like to thank the reviewer for making this point.

4. See http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/employment_and_social_policy/index_en.htm.

5. We discuss both ex ante and ex post parliamentary scrutiny, because the ex ante stage allows us to glean political parties’ positions and saliency more accurately than just in the transposition stage, because strategic adjustment may have taken place during ex post scrutiny.

6. This document summarises the EU proposal and indicates the position/strategy of the government. These ‘fiches’ are sent to parliament.

7. Each parliamentary committee has the possibility to organise a General Consultation with the respective minister. Traditionally, this takes place before the meeting of the relevant Council of Ministers in Brussels. Officially, General Consultations do not have a mandating character, but this meeting can be followed up by a plenary meeting of the parliament during which motions can be presented, asking the minister to change his/her position (Dutch Lower Chamber 2011).

8. In case a particular contribution was hard to label in terms of scrutiny goals, we opted for the lower category, in order not to inflate our results.

9. See http://vvd-nederland.blogspot.nl/2009/10/europa-moet-afblijven-van-onze.html.

10. Interview EU advisor Social Affairs Committee, Dutch Parliament, The Hague, 3 September 2013.