Institutional conditions for effective parliamentary oversight of European Union politics

Abstract

The implementation of European Union directives into national law frequently triggers extensive parliamentary activities, especially if they are complex, salient, and conflictive. These activities can cause delayed transposition. The literature suggests that early parliamentary involvement may speed up the subsequent transposition process. In this article, it is argued theoretically and empirically shown that this hope is only fulfilled where parliaments are sufficiently strong. On the empirical side, the article looks at the effect of ex-ante scrutiny on the duration of the transposition of more than 650 directives in four weak parliaments as well as in four strong parliaments. It is found that an early involvement of strong parliaments may speed up transposition. By contrast, weak parliaments’ early engagement with EU directives may even cause a further delay of the transposition process.

Keywords:

• Parliamentary oversight
• transposition
• implementation
• coalitions
• European Union

Notes

1. On closer inspection, it is found that the crucial difference between the two lower houses is that the Finnish Eduskunta enjoys significantly stronger rights to compel witnesses and to subpoena documents.

2. For example, ‘Gesetz zur Umsetzung der Vierten EU-Geldwäscherichtlinie und zur Ausführung der EU-Geldtransferverordnung’, adopted by the German Bundestag in June 2017.

3. For a list of these databases, please consult the online appendix.

4. To find out whether the unbalanced sample distorts the results, I weighted such that each directive has an equal probability to enter each of the two subsamples of weak and strong parliaments. The substantive results remain unchanged. Furthermore, the results are robust against excluding individual countries from the analysis.