The European Parliament oversight of EU agencies through written questions

ABSTRACT

The reinforcement of the legislative and oversight powers of the European Parliament by virtue of successive treaty reforms over the last two decades has been in parallel with an expanding process of agency creation at the European Union (EU) level. While these two institutional developments entail major transformations of legislative–executive relations in the EU, the European Parliament oversight of EU agencies remains an underexplored topic of research. Based on an original dataset on parliamentary written questions overseeing EU agencies asked during the 2009–14 Legislature, the article analyses members of the European Parliament (MEPs) questioning activity overseeing EU agencies. The article argues that legislative oversight of agencies through written questions is driven by MEPs national party opposition status as well as by agency salience and size.

KEY WORDS:

• EU agencies
• European Parliament
• oversight
• written questions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant number CSO2012-31443). We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and recommendations on previous versions of this article.

Notes

1 Question asked by Nick Griffin MEP. Available online at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+WQ+E-2010-2594+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN (accessed 17 May 2015).

2 Question asked by Georgios Papanikolaou MEP. Available online at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+WQ+E-2010-7961+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN (accessed 17 May 2015).

3 http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/countries.html (accessed 17 May 2015).

4 Newspapers covered: Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, The Sun, The Times (United Kingdom); The Irish Times (Ireland); Le figaro, Le Monde, L'Indépendent (France); L'Echo (Belgium); Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Tagesspiegel, Die Tageszeitung, Die Welt (Germany); Der Standard, Die Presse (Austria); Il Corriere, La Stampa, La Nazione, Il Giorno (Italy); El País, El Mundo, ABC (Spain) (accessed 15 November 2014).

5 http://www.eca.europa.eu/Lists/ECADocuments/SUMMARY_AGENCIES/Summary_Report_Agencies_en.pdf (accessed 17 May 2015). Not included in the report: EDA; EUISS; EU-LISA; and EUSC.

6 We rescaled the variable salience by dividing it by 10 in order to enable better interpretation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nuria Font

Biographical notes:

Nuria Font is an associate professor of political science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Ixchel Pérez Durán

Ixchel Pérez Durán is post-doctoral research fellow at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI).