Regional parliaments in the EU multilevel parliamentary system

ABSTRACT

European integration has created a multilevel political system that is dominated by executive actors. Despite the increasing competences of the European Parliament, a growing EU-awareness of national assemblies and an emerging attention of regional parliaments for EU affairs, the EU polity still lacks a sound parliamentary representation. As the EU presents itself as a representative democracy, the current set-up raises questions from the perspective of democratic legitimacy. The establishment of multilevel parliamentarianism may be part of the remedy. This introduction focuses on the position that regional parliaments take in such a European multilevel parliamentary system. The authors address three relevant questions: what roles do regional parliaments take up in terms of legislation, scrutiny and networking? To what extent are they empowered by the Lisbon Treaty? And what explains the variation in their activities? The authors develop hypotheses that are, to varying degree, addressed by the contributions in this special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• multilevel governance
• parliaments
• regions
• democratic deficit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Peter Bursens is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp. He is a specialist in European integration, federalism and multilevel political systems. He holds a Jean Monnet Chair on ‘skills teaching in European Union Studies’.

Anna-Lena Högenauer is Adjoint de Recherche at the University of Luxembourg. She works on European democracy and multilevel governance and has been a member of the Pademia and OPAL projects on the role of parliaments in the European Union from 2011 to 2016. Email: [email protected]