What role for national parliaments in EU governance? A view by members of parliament

ABSTRACT

Scholars have written much about what national parliaments can, should and actually do in European Union (EU) governance. What they have largely disregarded so far is the actors’ perspective. Which roles do national members of parliament (MPs) themselves view as a priority and how do they assess their performance? Which factors may structure observed variation? From a strategic perspective on legislative behavior, the article conceptualizes five roles for national MPs in EU politics: Scrutinizers, Subsidiarity Watchdogs, Networkers, Communicators and Transposers. It draws on plenary debates on the Constitutional Treaty, the Lisbon Treaty and the Eurozone crisis as well as data from 66 interviews with MPs from Austria, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom. There is a clear focus on scrutiny in EU affairs and communication to citizens. Ideological conviction and debate topics structure patterns in emphasis and assessment of these roles, while government-opposition dynamics and parliamentary strength only partially do.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• national parliaments
• multi-level democracy
• content analysis
• elite interviews

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this article has been presented at the Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on the European Union at Sciences Po Paris, June 2018. I thank the participants on this occasion and in particular Rik de Ruiter, Sandrino Smeets and Thomas Winzen for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Unitizing reliability (statement identification): percentage agreement 95% and correlation of .98; coding reliability of individual variables at or above agreement of 80% and correlation of .89. K alpha between .69 and .94 meets accepted standards (Lombard, Snyder-Duch, and Bracken 2002, 593).

2. We cannot compare the two data sources directly because of differences in data generation and sampling.

3. Less than three percent of statements did not contain an assessment.

4. Based on Chapel Hill expert-survey (Bakker et al. 2015), also for Figures 6 & 9.