To Scrutinise or Not to Scrutinise? Explaining Variation in EU-Related Activities in National Parliaments

Abstract

There is an on-going debate in the literature as to whether national parliaments can and do play an active role in EU policy-making. The main reason for persistent disagreement is the lack of comparative empirical data on parliamentary behaviour in EU affairs. The article aims to contribute to this debate by presenting the first comparative quantitative data on European affairs activities of national parliaments and by explaining the empirical variation. The development of a unique dataset including all 27 national parliaments allows a series of explanatory variables to be tested for the level of parliamentary activity at both the committee and the plenary levels. The analysis shows that institutional strength in EU affairs plays an important role. Overall, however, EU activities can be better explained with a mix of institutional capacities and motivational incentives. The specific combinations vary for different types of activities.

Acknowledgements

The research for this article has been conducted as part of the OPAL (Observatory of Parliaments after Lisbon) research consortium and was funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (10-ORAR-003-01). We also thank our OPAL partners at the Universities of Cambridge, Cologne and Maastricht, the coders who have supported us with the data collection, and the anonymous reviewers as well as Flora Chanvril-Ligneel, Martial Foucault, Peter Grand, Simon Otjes, Jan Rovny and Nicolas Sauger for their helpful advice. All errors remain our own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interests was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our analysis does not include the newest member state, since Croatia only acceded in 2013.

2. For details on the Early Warning System – the parliamentary subsidiarity check introduced with the Lisbon Treaty – see the introduction (Auel and Christiansen 2015) as well as Gattermann and Hefftler (2015). The Political Dialogue was introduced with the Barroso initiative in 2006 and aims at establishing a dialogue between national parliaments and the European Commission early in the policy-making process and not, as in the EWS, limited to aspects of subsidiarity (see Jančić 2012).

3. However, the numbers for the political opinions have to be viewed with some caution, as they are mainly due to the activity of the Portuguese Assembleia, which adopts opinions within the Political Dialogue on a very large number of documents sent by the European Commission (on average over 140 opinions per year). Given that most of these opinions do not include any comments on the document – other than a statement that the Assembleia has not found a breach of the subsidiarity principle – this inflates the overall and average number of opinions for all parliaments.

4. In comparison to MPs’ or citizens’ views on the EU, the level of involvement of a member state in the EMU can be considered as an indirect factor for the involvement of MPs in EU activity. Given the salience of the eurozone crisis during the period of investigation, it acted as an external shock that can be expected to have refocused MPs’ attention. We therefore consider this variable as a motivational incentive as well.

5. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/secretariat_general/relations/relations_other/npo/index_en.htm.

6. IPEX (InterParliamentary EU information eXchange, http://www.ipex.eu) is an internet platform that provides detailed information on parliamentary scrutiny by EU document and aims at facilitating information exchanges between national parliaments.

7. The data collection took place between May 2012 and February 2013 on the basis of a detailed codebook. The 25 coders are mostly native speakers and received training in two workshops.

8. The return rate was 100 per cent, although specific data was missing in a few cases, which was added through our own calculations.

9. We used data for the question: ‘For each of the following institutions, please tell me if you tend to trust it or tend not to trust it: the European Union?’ (answers for ‘tend not to trust’ only), calculating the mean for the two waves/year covering the period 2010–2012 (Standard Eurobarometer Surveys 73 to 78). Data was retrieved through the interactive Eurobarometer search system, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/cf/index_en.cfm. As there may be a bias linked to the wording of questions that gauge Euroscepticism, we also used an aggregate measure based on including data from three questions related to public opinion on the EU but our results remained the same.

10. The Chapel Hill data is based on expert surveys; respondents were asked to assess ‘the general position on European integration that the party leadership took over the course of 2010’ on a scale from 1 = strongly opposed to 7 = strongly in favour. A party was considered Eurosceptic if it had a score of 3.5 or below. Missing data (Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta, new parties in parliaments after 2010) was added on the basis of information country experts supplied.

11. Yet it should be noted that there are no problems of collinearity between both variables in our models.

12. Results are similar when we omit the two most active parliaments, the Finnish Eduskunta and the Swedish Riksdag.

13. Conférence des Organes Parlementaires Spécialisés dans les Affaires de l'Union des Parlements de l'Union Européenne.