Actions Speak Louder Than Words? The Untapped Potential of V4 Parliaments in EU Affairs

Abstract

This article offers the first ever comparative analysis of the involvement of V4 parliaments in the sphere of European Union (EU) affairs. Its underlying research objective is to determine what conditions V4’s parliamentary participation in various EU-oriented activities such as domestic scrutiny of the government’s EU policy, the political dialogue with the Commission, the Early Warning System for subsidiarity control, and the green card initiative. Based on the actual scrutiny output, parliamentary minutes, and data from questionnaires, we address the questions: (1) To what extent domestic legislatures act as autonomous as opposed to government-supporting actors in these arenas? (2) Do they mostly act as EU veto players, or try to contribute constructively to the EU policy-making process by bringing alternative policy ideas? (3) What are their motivations for engaging in direct dialogue with EU institutions in addition to domestic scrutiny? and (4) How MPs envisage their own EU-oriented roles? While the article reveals that V4 parliaments mostly act as gatekeepers in the sphere of EU affairs, it also casts a new light on the previous literature findings related to the EU-oriented performance of the Czech and Polish lower chambers. We conclude that, generally, V4 parliaments refrain from fully exploiting their relatively strong formal prerogatives in EU affairs—a fact that can be partly explained by the composition of their ruling majorities.

On time or with a delay? Transposition of EU directives in the Czech Republic in relation to subsidiarity check

“…However, such effects do not always have the expected influence. For instance, higher (party/public) Euroscepticism does not necessarily lead to more opinions expressed within the EWM/PD framework (Borońska-Hryniewiecka and Grinc 2022) or to more noncompliance (Toshkov 2019). Rather, the opposite can happen.…”

“…Similarly, several studies also showed that the positions expressed by the parliament in reasoned opinions or PD resolutions are often in line with the position of the government on the particular legal act (cf. Borońska-Hryniewiecka and Grinc 2022; Cornell and Goldoni 2017), which might be positively reflected later in the transposition process.…”

“…Firstly, the two chambers of the Czech Parliament belong to one of the most active national parliaments sending its PDs or reasoned opinions to the EU (cf. Borońska-Hryniewiecka and Grinc 2022; European Commission 2010–2020a; European Parliament 2017, 21–24; Grinc 2015; Hrabálek and Strelkov 2015, 502–503), 13 despite its relatively moderate oversight institutions for EU affairs (cf. Auel et al.…”

“…However, due to differences between countries in the length of EU membership, the Czech Republic can instead represent the smaller group, in particular that of the CEE/Visegrád countries (cf. also Borońska-Hryniewiecka and Grinc 2022), whose oversight institutions are relatively strong (Karlas 2011) and whose compliance performance is overall better than in Western/Southern Europe (Zhelyazkova et al. 2017).…”

“…2017), similar to the rest of the CEE. There have also been some (separate) studies comparing the Czech Republic with other countries on the EWM/PD (Borońska-Hryniewiecka and Grinc 2022; Granat 2017), other tools of parliamentary scrutiny (Finke and Dannwolf 2013), transposition of directives (Zbíral 2017; Zbíral and Grinc 2020), and compliance with EU law (Falkner 2010), and a few individual analyses on implementation of specific policies (such as Baun and Marek 2013). Again, however, nobody has linked both stages of policy-making and tried to empirically investigate an impact of the ex-ante stage with EWM/PD on the ex-post transposition of several EU legislative acts.…”