Studying the influence of national parliaments in EU affairs: reconnecting empirical research and the Principal-Agent approach

ABSTRACT

The literature on national parliaments and the EU has built up its knowledge on the strength and activities of domestic parliaments in the European Union. While these studies were of outmost importance to understand how and why parliaments and MPs act on EU affairs, we still know little on the influence of domestic parliaments on the EU policy of their executive and on EU policy-making more generally. The article first presents the current gaps in knowledge as well as the challenges to study the influence of parliaments in EU affairs and ends by presenting a research strategy which advocates ‘reconnecting’ empirical works on national parliaments and the EU with the Principal-Agent model. This research agenda could foster new theoretical and empirical studies with important implications for the debate on the (re)parliamentarisation of the European Union as well as on EU negotiations.

KEYWORDS:

• National parliaments
• EU policy-making
• Europeanisation
• Executive-legislative relationship
• Principal-Agent

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The remainder of this paragraph is mainly dealing with how domestic Agent’s reactions can be operationalised vis-à-vis their domestic Principal. Therefore, it only tackles indirectly whether the proposed procedure also applies for supranational Agent. Indeed, in the case of supranational Agent(s), the reader must bear in mind that there is no exclusive delegation between the domestic Principal (i.e., domestic parliaments) and the supranational Agent, as the latter are not directly accountable to domestic parliaments. While some studies already focus on the relation between national parliaments and the European Commission – thanks to the EWM and political dialogue mechanism and, on occasional basis, hearings of Commissioners in domestic parliaments -, less is known on other types of supranational Agents, such as EU agencies. Further research should be conducted on this matter.