Sounding out national parliaments
Looking at the early days of a project intended to show how – and how much – national parliaments are using their powers to influence EU policymaking.
On paper, the Lisbon treaty significantly expands the influence of national parliaments in European policymaking. Parliaments are now fed more information directly from Brussels, have a right to participate in certain evaluation and control processes, and can object directly to the European Commission if they think legislative proposals compromise the subsidiarity principle.
Yet relatively little is known about whether parliaments are rising to this challenge, or if it is considered an unwelcome distraction from their work holding governments to account. The Observatory of Parliaments After Lisbon (OPAL) has been set up to find out, and to produce a systematic analysis of the way national parliaments engage in EU politics.
“It is a two-way system,” explains Thomas Christiansen, professor of European institutional politics at Maastricht University and OPAL’s academic co-ordinator. “One line of inquiry is to ask what can and do parliaments achieve at the European level. People are quite sceptical about that, and so are we, but we will study it. The other line of inquiry is to ask what the system does at the national level. How does this change the behaviour of national parliaments? How does it change political debates within member states?” This second question has received relatively little attention from researchers. “We start with the hypothesis that there is a potential for transforming national politics,” he says.
As well as Maastricht, OPAL involves academics from Cologne and Cambridge universities and the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (otherwise known as Sciences Po) in Paris. The three-year project, with a budget of around €2 million, is funded by social-science research councils in Germany, France, the UK and the Netherlands.
Each academic centre has chosen an aspect of the post-Lisbon situation to examine (see page 18), drawing on a common body of data that will be assembled by the project as a whole. This ranges from quantitative information collected across the EU, plus Croatia, to more detailed qualitative information on specific EU member states.
EU expertise
The bedrock of the project will be a database of activity relating to EU affairs, since the Lisbon treaty came into effect, in 40 national parliamentary chambers. This includes debates, resolutions and mandates, opinions and activities about inter-parliamentary co-operation, relations with other member states or EU institutions, and hearings with private actors and experts. Collecting this data from parliamentary websites and documents is down to Sciences Po, extending the expertise it has gained from running an observatory of European institutions.
More detailed quantitative data will then be collected in eight countries: the researchers’ home nations plus Denmark, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. This will involve interviews with MPs, committee clerks and party-group experts, covering both European affairs committees and a selection of other standing committees. Meanwhile, at the European level, there will be interviews with parliaments’ permanent representatives, staff at COSAC (the conference of EU affairs committees) and key figures in the European Commission, Council of Ministers and European Parliament.
OPAL’s initial plan was to ask general questions about how these parliaments scrutinise EU issues and participate in mechanisms such as the early-warning system on subsidiarity. But then the researchers decided something more substantial was required. “Potentially, all of these things are a bit empty of content,” says Christiansen. “So maybe we can bring them to life by telling some stories about how different parliaments deal with different kinds of decisions.”
So three case studies were selected, covering different policy areas and types of EU decision-making, to illustrate how the parliaments operate. The first study is of the proposed directive on seasonal workers, which is a legislative case covered by the early-warning system on subsidiarity and an issue with potential to create tension between national and EU interests. “We chose it because people had already expressed concerns about it,” Christiansen explains. “We didn’t want something that was just waved through without any debate at all. We wanted something that causes an element of friction and that therefore can bring us some results.”
The second is Operation Atalanta, a naval mission to curb pirate activity off the coast of Somalia, which was launched in 2008 under the Common Security and Defence Policy. This is a non-legislative case where national parliaments have limited powers. The third is the sovereign-debt crisis, an area where increased EU activity affects national parliaments’ core budgetary powers. Here the idea is to see how parliaments participate in the negotiation, implementation and execution of measures to combat the crisis and provide longer-term fiscal-policy co-ordination.
Engaging with such a vast issue is not straightforward. “Do we worry more about the bail-out stories or the multi-annual financial framework that is now going through? Do we look at the six-pack? How much do we privilege the euro zone over the non-euro zone? There is still a lot of discussion,” says Christiansen.
While many of the questions on OPAL’s agenda could have been addressed by academics working alone, the scope of the project is unique. “Our ambition is to be comprehensive in our empirical analysis, to look at all 27 parliaments – 28 with Croatia — and nobody could have done that on their own,” says Christiansen.
The division of labour has been a challenge, but the consortium has come up with a matrix structure in which each centre plays to its disciplinary strengths while sharing other tasks. For example, each of the teams will study two countries in depth, but interview questions will cover all four thematic strands and all three case studies. Setting up the structure has taken about a year, but the researchers are now embarking on their fieldwork. There have been some bumps along the way – such as the Dutch general election, which made it difficult to pin down interviewees.
There was also a surprise when, earlier this year, the Commission received its first ‘yellow card’ under the early-warning system on subsidiarity. Twelve national parliaments complained that proposed legislation on workers’ right to strike overstepped the mark. The proposal was subsequently withdrawn, although the Commission said its decision was a response to government objections rather than the yellow card. Even so, Christiansen sees the event as significant. “We can chalk it up as the early-warning system having been activated and having delivered some sort of result. That may be surprising for those who were talking it down to start with.”
This also indicates that OPAL is working at the beginning of a new system of political relationships within the EU. “In some ways Lisbon seems a long time ago, but it took a while for national parliaments to set things up,” Christiansen explains. “We’ve come in just at the point when they’ve started to become more active.”
With one year to set up and two years to collect data, this makes the project’s window of observation frustratingly narrow. Ideally, the team would like to run the project for longer, to see how the system evolves and identify highs and lows of activity.
Given extra resources, they would also have compared parliamentary activity before and after the Lisbon treaty, and before and after the crisis. “But what we are doing is already quite significant, for the first time going in depth into all 27 countries,” Christiansen says.
The researchers will start writing up their findings and presenting
their work at conferences next year. Several major publications are
planned, including “The Palgrave Handbook of National Parliaments and the European Union”, due in 2014, and a special issue of the journal “West European Politics” devoted to the performance of multi-level democracy in Europe.
RESEARCH THEMES
Domestic watchdogs
Sciences Po will ask whether parliaments are able to influence their governments when it comes to EU affairs, how this happens and, in the absence of influence, whether their activity has other impacts.
Lead academics: Katrin Auel, Olivier Rozenberg, Renaud Dehousse
Non-legislative processes
Cambridge University will look at parliamentary involvement in non-legislative EU policy processes, particularly involving the Common Security and Defence Policy.
Lead academics: Julie Smith, Geoffrey Edwards
Beyond the domestic
Cologne University will look at parliamentary activity beyond the domestic arena, such as inter-parliamentary co-operation and contacts with EU institutions.
Lead academic: Wolfgang Wessels
Parliamentary administrations
Maastricht University will look at the role of parliamentary administrations in EU affairs, including the structures and appointed officials that parliaments employ in order to exercise their functions.
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Lead academics: Thomas Christiansen, Christine Neuhold