Explaining the evolving role of national parliaments under the European Semester

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines and explains the role of national parliaments in the European Semester process. It builds on original survey-based evidence and traces whether national parliaments discuss and vote on Stability/Convergence and on National Reform Programmes; how their involvement changed over time; and what might condition national varieties of parliamentary scrutiny over European Union (EU) affairs. We find significant cross-country variation in whether the debate is taking place at the parliamentary level; whether it is European Affairs or finance committees that are involved; and whether there is involvement ex ante (before submission) and/or ex post (after country-specific recommendations). From 2012 to 2015, finance committees played an increasingly prominent role. Traditional measures of the strength of parliament do not explain what we observe. We do find that non-euro area member states were most likely to monitor EU recommendations under the European Semester and that this effect increased over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Budget Committee
• Europeanization
• European Semester
• national parliaments

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank participants at the ACCESS EUROPE workshop, 11–12 December 2015, at the University of Amsterdam, for their helpful comments. Our anonymous reviewers checked each draft and pushed us to improve the text. Amy Verdun and Jonathan Zeitlin have been terrific, and patient, co-editors. Lola Mueller and Dayna Sadow provided needed editorial assistance. Finally, we thank the many respondents to our surveys.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mark Hallerberg is Professor of Public Management and Political Economy at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany.

Benedicta Marzinotto is Assistant Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Udine (Italy) and visiting professor at the College of Europe.

Guntram B. Wolff is the Director of Bruegel, the European think tank focussing on economics.

ORCID

Mark Hallerberg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4617-9929

Notes

1 The staff from the Bulgarian Parliament wrote to us in 2012 that they refused to answer the survey, and the staff from the respective committees did not answer at all in 2013.

2 The countries included in the pilot project were Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary and Ireland. See Hallerberg et al. (2011).

3 We discussed the Danish case in the introduction. In Ireland, in 2013, the Finance and European Affairs committees respectively participated in ex ante discussions for the first time, with the former debating its Stability Programme and the latter its National Reform Programme.

4 We did not have data for 2012 for Croatia, when it was not a member state, and we did not include it in the 2015 survey.

5 On some occasions, a member of parliament on the respective committee answered a questionnaire instead of, or in addition to, a committee staff member.

6 The European Commission also delivered detailed country reports prior to the release of its country-specific recommendations, as two separate documents prior to 2015 and as a Country Report released in February as of 2015 (for more details, see the introduction to this collection 2017). We did not ask national parliaments about these documents.

7 The European framework also encourages national parliamentary involvement through the Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (known as the Fiscal Compact) where all EU governments recognize the importance of a stronger co-operation between the European and national parliaments on budgetary issues making use of the Interparliamentary Co-operation (Art.13), as well as stress that any fiscal corrective action should be put in place in full respect of the prerogatives of national parliaments (Art.3).

8 Maatsch (2017) notes, however, that the plenaries in three of her four cases in 2014 did discuss country-specific recommendations when a given party disputed them. This contestation was not repeated in these countries in 2015.

9 Note that member states submit one document that includes both the SCP and NRP. There remain, however, key differences ex post in the consideration of the two.

10 The exception is Italy, where four committees – Budget, Economics, Labour/Employment, and European – debated the National Reform Programme. In addition to Italy, only in Germany (Economics) and Luxembourg (Labour) were other committees involved.

11 Spain held a plenary debate on the Commission response to the SCP (only) in 2011.

12 Auel et al. (2015) also measure the activity of national parliaments on EU matters and combine this information into a more general score, or the ‘OPAL EU score’. Because we wish to check whether stronger parliaments are more active, we rely only on their institutional score. More on the OPAL project may be found at http://www.opal-europe.org.

13 One can also define ‘strength’ as whether parliament already debates the government's domestic multi-annual fiscal plans. This is a narrower definition of ‘strength’ that focuses only on debate rather than action, but it accords well with the information we have on debates in the plenary and in committee on European Semester matters. In 2012, only five countries had plenary debates on domestic as well as on European multiannual plans (France, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Spain, and the UK). Two countries, Italy and Portugal, did discuss Stability Programmes submitted to the EU even if they did not debate on national plans. As both parliaments were weak on budgetary matters, one can speculate that some weak parliaments may exploit EU procedures to gain access to issues they would not otherwise have a chance to discuss. Eleven countries that discussed government multi-annual plans in plenary ignored Stability/Convergence Programmes. Clearly, this is not a good predictor, and we did not pursue this argument further in the 2015 survey.

14 See also Dandashly and Verdun (2016), who discuss the views among the Czech, Hungarian and Polish populations. They note that Hungary began as the most positive towards euro adoption and the Czech Republic as the least, but the euro crisis meant that support for the euro also decreased in Hungary.

15 The five are the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

16 We use the percentage of respondents who agreed with the following statement: ‘(OUR COUNTRY) could better face the future outside the EU.’

17 Note, however, that there are two missing in 2015, with the UK not holding hearings because there were no parliamentary committees yet formed after May 2015 elections in the US to host them and because the Czech Republic is the one missing survey for the 2015 cohort.

18 Baerg and Hallerberg (2016) used the question ‘Taking everything into consideration, would you say that (your country) has on balance benefited or not from being a member of the European Community (Common Market)? But the European Commission did not ask this question under the Eurobarometer in 2012.