Effective Control of European Union Politics by national Parliaments

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Daniel Finke
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2012 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 225959322

The delegation of decision making competences from the national to the European level has increased governmental discretion vis-à-vis national parliaments. Due to the nontransparent decision making procedures national parliaments find it difficult to effectively control their governments when acting at the European level. For this reason, normative democratic theory suggests extended scrutiny powers for both, national parliaments and the European Parliament (Rittberger 2005; Follesdal und Hix 2005). From a comparative perspective, parliamentary scrutiny varies with respect to procedural rules and available resources. However, extended scrutiny powers and increased resources are not sufficient to guarantee the effectiveness of parliamentary control. Instead, effective control depends on the balance of power between government and parliament as well as between governing and opposition parties. Existing studies compare the instruments and procedures available to national parliaments when scrutinizing EU legislation. In contrast to studies that compare different institutional designs, we raise the question of why under a given set of procedural rules some EU policy proposals are scrutinized by parliamentary committees whereas others go unchecked. Specifically, we answer this question for twenty national parliaments in the European Union which sponsor a significant variation of procedural rules. Ultimately, we aim at identifying the optimal design of parliamentary scrutiny procedures that guarantees an effective control of national governments in European Union politics.In order to answer these questions we compile a data set which contains information on the scrutiny activities at the level of policy proposal drafted by either the European Commission or the Council. Specifically, the data set records information on the activities within the national parliaments as well as at the European level. The primary sources for constructing this data set are the online data bases on the scrutiny of European policy proposals provided by almost all national parliaments. In order to validate the data and to render the information comparable across countries we plan to conduct a series of interviews with members of the parliamentary administrations responsible for data base maintenance. The results obtained by the quantitative analysis will be validated by case studies and expert interviews (triangulation). The applicant has successfully applied the proposed research design to analyze the scrutiny activities in the German and Czech parliaments (Finke und Dannwolf 2012).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants