http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9867-3742
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
While the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty has important implications for regional parliaments with legislative competences, most studies have focused on cross-country differences or examined the activities of regional parliaments at the EU level. This contribution shows the existence of substantial intra-country differences in the formal scrutiny rights of regional parliaments. We analyse how German regional parliaments (Landtage) have addressed the challenge of controlling their governments in EU affairs. Using fuzzy-set comparative qualitative analysis, we find that institutional and partisan factors (vote share in the second chamber, economic potential, and conservative governments) explain the differences found among German Landtage particularly well. Landtage with otherwise weak parliamentary prerogatives were successful in using the reform momentum to strengthen their rights in the field of EU policy. Combined with the party political salience of EU policy-making, the integration process has thus empowered formally weaker Landtage.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of the paper were presented at the PADEMIA Workshop organized by Jan Karlas and Viera Knutelská entitled ‘Variation in national parliamentary control and inter-parliamentary cooperation in EU’ at Charles University Prague on April 8, 2016, at the Council of European Studies Annual Conference (2015) in Paris, the UACES 46th Annual Conference in London (2016) as well as the German Politics Colloquium organized by Sabine Kropp at Freie Universität Berlin (2016). For helpful comments, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers as well as Thurid Hustedt, Jan Karlas, Sabine Kropp, Christoph Nguyen, Sho Niikawa, François Randour, and Werner Reutter. Anna Hundehege deserves our gratitude for excellent research support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Aron Buzogány http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9867-3742
Notes
1 See LastG, Lastentragungsgesetz im Bund-Länder-Verhältnis bei der Verletzung supranationaler oder völkerrechtlicher Verpflichtungen.
2 Due to differences in constructing the Index, our measure is not directly comparable to those used in studies of national parliaments.
4 For detailed information, see Table A1 in Appendix 1.
5 According to Schelling (Citation1960, 22) […] ‘the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself; that, in bargaining, weakness is often strength, freedom may be freedom to capitulate, and to burn bridges behind one may suffice to undo an opponent’. For an application to European multilevel politics, see Finke and Dannwolf (Citation2013). We are not aware of applications to the regional level in an EU context.
6 Note that QCA is built on set-theoretical assumptions. Therefore, the explanandum has to be defined as being included into the set ‘strong EU-scrutiny’.
7 We thank André Kaiser for this suggestion.
8 The score is a combination of 10 different factors: 1. Parliamentary election of all cabinet members. 2. Direct vote of no confidence. 3. No premature end of legislative term by the prime minister’s will. 4. Qualified majority for the extension of the parliamentary agenda. 5. Forwarding of drafts to the committees only after plenary session. 6. No limitation for individual legislative initiatives. 7. Lack of suspensive veto against parliamentary bills. 9. Parliamentary minority’s right to summon members of cabinet to committee sessions. 9. Parliamentary minority’s right to request particular files. 10. A single faction’s right to request judicial review of the compatibility of a law with the constitution. Scores differ from 0 to 1, the presence of a factor leads to high values, which stand for low executive dominance.
9 http://www.bundeslaenderranking.de/i_best_gesamt.html, as accessed on 24 February 2016.
10 Note that this does not imply that all parliaments with at least four votes automatically possess strong EU scrutiny rights.
11 Note: Including the necessary condition ‘Federal impact’ does not increase the solution coverage. Hence, we reduced the model to the three remaining conditions.
12 subs *∼parlright (0.89; 0.35).
13 ∼parlright * econ (1; 0.30).
14 subs * econ (0.83; 0.44).