This article analyses the differences in institutional design in national parliamentary control over European Union affairs among EU member states. It proceeds from a preference-based perspective, drawing on the principal-agent framework, and a timebased perspective, inspired by the historical institutionalist approach. The article involves a qualitative comparative analysis of strong control and a quantitative, correlation analysis of variation in the degree of control. It argues that time-based factors provide a more persuasive overall explanation for the differences in control than preference-based factors.

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This survey article provides the first comprehensive assessment of the functioning of the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM), the central monitoring platform of the World Trade Organization (WTO), over the first 20 years of the WTO's existence (1995–2014). Building on two large new datasets, we assess the performance of the Mechanism along three dimensions: (1) members’ participation rates in trade policy reviews (TPRs); (2) the coverage of trade flows through participation of states in relevant TPRs; and (3) the content of their input into the reviews. Descriptively, we identify a very prominent increase in members’ participation rates, but also a very high share of dyadic trade flows covered by the TPRs. In the most recent period, members accounting for up to 95 per cent of the imports into the reviewed state take part in the TPRs, on average. We also argue that the Mechanism provides space for substantial critical reviewing of members’ policies, especially in some areas such as agriculture. However, we also identify specific pitfalls of the Mechanism, especially in its excessive formalism and lack of interactive discussion.

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This text presents the first systematic quantitative descriptive and explanatory account of World Trade Organization (WTO) member states’ compliance with their one-time and regular notification obligations. The system of around 170 notifications, through which states are obliged to provide to the WTO relevant information on their policies, constitutes a key mechanism of transparency in the global trade regime. Based on data for the one-time and regular obligations from the years 1995–2014, we seek to map and explain the variation in the degree to which states comply with these obligations. Descriptively, we identify enormous differences in the compliance values of states, ranging from compliance well above 80% to below 20%. To explain those differences, we test five theoretical explanations that concentrate on the trade policy preferences of states and on their institutional characteristics. The empirical findings support four of the tested explanations. In particular, they highlight the relevance of states’ administrative capacities and membership in international organizations (IOs). In addition, the empirical analysis shows that compliance levels are strongly positively connected with the economic size of the members.