The question of strengths and weaknesses of national parliaments in EU affairs, one of the most salient in the debate on the democratic legitimacy of the EU, is generally answered by assessing formal parliamentary powers which can influence their governments' EU policy. Such an evaluation, however, is flawed: Formal mandating rights are usually incompatible with the overall logic of parliamentary systems, which explains why most national parliaments make very little use of them. Even more importantly, it unduly reduces parliamentary functions to the legislative or policy-making function. Drawing on agency theory, it will instead be argued that the functions of public deliberation and of holding the government publicly to account are at least as important and therefore need to be included in a redefined concept of parliamentary strength. In particular, the article proposes a distinction between two different elements of accountability-monitoring and political scrutiny-which recognises parliamentary majority and opposition as two distinct agents of the electorate.

There is an on-going debate in the literature as to whether national parliaments can and actually do play an active role in EU policy-making. The main reason for this persistent disagreement is based on the lack of comparative empirical data on parliamentary behaviour in EU affairs. The article aims to contribute to this debate by presenting the first comparative quantitative data on European affairs activities of national parliaments and by explaining the empirical variation. The development of a unique dataset including all 27 national parliaments allows us to test a series of explanatory variables for the level of parliamentary activity both at the committee and at the plenary level. Our analysis shows that institutional strength in EU affairs plays an important role. Overall, however, EU activities can be better explained with a mix of institutional capacities and motivational incentives. The specific combinations vary for different types of activities.

Over the last 20 years, the role of national parliaments in European Union (EU)

Parliamentary systems can be characterised by particular patterns of interaction between the executive, the majority parties and the opposition parties in parliament. The basic argument outlined in this paper is that in order to understand the impact of European integration on national parliamentary democracies we have to find out how these patterns are adjusted. The article starts by identifying the basic social mechanisms that drive the interaction of the mentioned groups of actors and by describing how they are modified in European multi-level governance. In this context, members of national parliaments are faced with a dilemma: Successful scrutiny can undermine the effectiveness of European governance whereas a permissive parliament causes a legitimacy deficit. Through case studies on the Europeanisation of the parliamentary systems in the UK, in Denmark and in Germany, the authors show how members of parliaments cope with this challenge and which strategies they apply to avoid the dilemma.