In the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, much of the academic debate on national parliaments (NPs) After reviewing the most important provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon on national parliaments, the paper discusses the roles of parliamentary administrations in the scrutiny of EU affairs and the exercise of political oversight over their activities. The concluding section discusses the extent to which the Treaty of Lisbon can be said to have triggered a rise of parliamentary administrations.4

Much of the discussion about the provisions on national parliaments in the Lisbon

In this research note, we propose studying a new trend of Europeanisation in national parliaments within the European Union (EU). We argue that further integration, combined with the opportunities and challenges presented by the Lisbon Treaty and the financial crisis, created pressure on national parliaments to expand the scrutiny process beyond European Affairs Committees. In this new phase of Europeanisation, parliaments are increasingly 'mainstreaming' EU affairs scrutiny, blurring the distinction between national and European policies and involving larger numbers of MPs. Following a review of existing research on the Europeanisation of national parliaments in the post-Lisbon era, we propose studying four dimensions of mainstreaming: the rising involvement of sectoral committees in European affairs; the adaptation of parliamentary staff to EU policy-making; the growing salience of European affairs in plenary debates; and increasing inter-parliamentary cooperation beyond European affairs specialists. We argue that this trend has significant implications for research that studies the roles of national parliaments in the democratic functioning of the EU.

The series maps the range of disciplines addressing the study of European public administration. In particular, contributions to the series will engage with the role and nature of the evolving bureaucratic processes of the European Union, including the study of the EU's civil service, of organizational aspects of individual institutions such as the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the External Action Service, the European Parliament, the European Court and the European Central Bank, and of inter-institutional relations among these and other actors. The series also welcomes contributions on the growing role of EU agencies, networks of technical experts and national officials, and of the administrative dimension of multi-level governance, including international organizations. Of particular interest in this respect will be the emergence of a European diplomatic service and the management of the EU's expanding commercial, foreign, development, security and defence policies, as well as the role of institutions in a range of other policy areas of the Union.

Enhancing the role of national parliaments in the European Union's decisionmaking process has for some time been a popular way in which policymakers have sought to address legitimacy problems in the European Union, the Early Warning Mechanism being only one example. In response to these developments, an increasing number of scholars have addressed the question of how parliaments make use of these powers in practice. An important dimension of the process -the role of parliamentary officials in parliamentary scrutiny and control -has so far been neglected in the literature. Against this background, this article examines the role of the representatives of national parliaments in the European Parliament with the aim of understanding the role and the nature of this 'bureaucratic network'. While falling short of an epistemic community, these officials play an important role in enabling parliamentary scrutiny through the dissemination of information.