The Foreign Relations of National Legislatures: Structures, Explanations, Effects

• Applicant: Dr. Thomas Malang
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 447624982

Legislatures are regarded as the big institutional losers of internationalization. Parliamentary representation and control - main dimensions of democratic legitimacy - have traditionally been rare and weak at the international level. Parliaments became increasingly marginalized, mostly limiting their international tasks to the (ex-post) ratification of international agreements and ex-post scrutiny. This “decline of parliament” was a major component of the “democratic deficit” diagnosis, throughout the 1990s and 2000s.However, contrary to this “de-parliamentarization”, we can observe that national legislatures increased their international activities to regain power vis-à-vis their government. This elevated international activity is not only observable for legislatures in democratic systems, but throughout the world, including parliaments in anocratic and autocratic regimes. However, comprehensive theoretical accounts as well as systematic empirical analyses about the causes and consequences of parliamentary foreign relations are largely missing so far. We do not have systematic evidence on parliaments’ goals and incentives in establishing parliamentary foreign relations, that is, do they seek to gain information in order to control the executive, or to socialize and learn from likeminded MPs, or do they aim to export certain values? Moreover, we do not know whether these relations have any effect on international or domestic outcomes? The goal of the proposed research group is to study the determinants of parliamentary foreign relations for all national legislatures (causes) and identify the (feedback) effects of these relations on domestic and international politics (consequences).The project seeks to apply a classical principal-agent framework to explain the variance in incentives for democratic and non-democratic regimes to account for their differences in selecting foreign partners. Whereas parliaments in democratic regimes are assumed to control the specific international activities of their governments and select their partner countries for foreign exchange accordingly, parliaments in non-democratic regimes are expected have different incentives like democratization. In a second step, the project theoretically and empirically investigates whether the concrete patterns of parliamentary foreign relations have an effect on international outcomes like democratization and treaty ratification as well as domestic effects like scrutiny and communication behavior in parliament.The proposed research project seeks to address the above mentioned questions within a mixed-methods design. First, a global quantitative part especially entails the complete collection of bilateral and multilateral parliamentary foreign relations between 1990-2020, and second a case study part, which disentangles the complexities of international parliamentary activity on a micro (MP) and meso (party) level for six selected legislatures.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups