Parliamentary accountability and EU action against democratic backsliding

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Winzen
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547672734

This project starts from a puzzling observation. For over a decade, the European Union (EU) struggled to employ its most forceful tools to constrain democratic backsliding in its member states, but in some cases the EU deviated from this reluctant approach and suspended funding from the countries concerned. What explains variation in EU action against democratic backsliding in the member states? What might motivate the EU to take decisive action against governments that seek to dismantle democracy and the rule of law? This project puts the relationship between parliamentary accountability and the EU’s actions against democratic backsliding front and centre. My objective is to develop and test a multilevel approach to parliamentary accountability and its impact on the EU’s response to democratic backsliding. The main idea is that parliamentary accountability can exert pressure on the European Commission and Council to act against democratic backsliding, but that this effect depends on region-wide, multilelvel configurations of accountability. I suggest that EU action against democratic backsliding becomes more likely the stronger, more synchronized, congruent, and substantively consistent parliamentary accountability becomes across Europe’s national parliaments and the European Parliament. This project will develop this argument as well as concepts and measures to assess multilevel configurations of accountability and their implications for EU decisions systematically. Conceiving of parliamentary accountability in terms of parliamentary debate, this project proposes collecting new, comparative data on the extent and substance of parliamentary debate on democratic backsliding in the member states and the role of the EU in this context. These data will allow mapping and explaining when and why parliamentary accountability emerges in different parliaments and assessing the extent to which it is congruent across Europe’s parliaments at the national and European levels. Building on the concept of the decision opportunity, the project will systematically identify moments in which the Commission and Council had the opportunity to act (or fail to act) against backsliding in the EU member states and relate the outcomes of these moments systematically to multilevel configurations in parliamentary accountability. Overall, the project thus theorizes and test the potential of a new parliamentary accountability mechanism for the support and protection of democracy in the EU member states.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants