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Abstract
As compensation for their disempowerment in the process of European integration, national parliaments have been provided with various new rights and powers since the 1990s, culminating in the current provisions of the Lisbon Treaty. This paper argues, however, that rather than simply re-enhancing traditional powers of national parliaments, these reforms imply ideas of a new type of parliamentary democracy in Europe. It identifies three different roles for national parliaments in the EU: preventing rather than shaping legislation (gatekeeping role), cooperating with other parliaments and supranational institutions (networking role), and adopting a uniform mode control of government across all party groups (unitary scrutiniser role). All these roles require a significant deviation from the standard role legislatures usually play in European parliamentary democracies. The paper briefly explores how national parliaments in two ‘old’ (France, Germany) and one ‘new’ (Poland) member state fulfil these three new roles.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants of the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop ‘The (Re)Configuration of Political Representation in the EU‘, Antwerp, 10–15 April, 2012 for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. A special thanks goes to Sebastian Knecht and Klara Schwobe for their excellent research assistance.
Notes
1. Each national parliament has two votes, which are distributed equally in case of bicameral systems.