Effectiveness of the European Semester: Explaining Domestic Consent and Contestation

Abstract

MPIfG Discussion Papers are refereed scholarly papers of the kind that are publishable in a peer-reviewed disciplinary journal. Their objective is to contribute to the cumulative improvement of theoretical knowledge. The papers can be ordered from the institute for a small fee (hard copies) or downloaded free of charge (PDF). (2014 and 2015) in Austria, France, Germany, and Ireland. While in France and Germany, compliance within the European Semester has been subject to strong politicization, this has not been the case in Austria and Ireland. Moreover, strong politicization coincided with the contestation of country-specific recommendations among the parliamentary parties. The empirical analysis established that strong formal powers in budgetary matters constitute an important prerequisite allowing parliamentary parties to articulate their contestation. However, the willingness to comply depends most directly on whether the content of country-specific recommendations is coherent with the economic preferences of a political party, not the government-opposition cleavage. Keywords

Smoke with fire: Financial crises and the demand for parliamentary oversight in the European Union

“…Other works have uncovered the ways national parliaments have discussed the crisis and the supervision of the Eurozone crisis managers (e.g. Maatsch 2017;Puntscher Riekmann & Wydra 2013;Rauh and de Wilde 2018). Here, we focus on structural economic reasons for why parliaments may have (a) adopted and (b) debated EU oversight.…”

“…We start from the observation that EU member state parliaments, which are representations of domestic publics and aggregations of political parties, often struggle to provide credible and prompt solutions during a crisis, given the semi-integrated set up of the European Union (Mair 2009, Laffan 2014. So, despite public divisions over the monitoring of parliamentary affairs (Ruiz-Rufino and Alonso 2017) and party disagreements in the domestic chambers (Maatsch 2017;Wonka 2016), legislatures need to confront the EU supranational institutions as unitary actors in order to fulfill their representative purpose. 2 We maintain that demand for increased parliamentary scrutiny of the EU varies between EMU members and non-members and depends on their possibility to react to the crisis with fiscal means (Fasone 2014;Hallerberg et al 2018).…”

National parliaments and EU economic performance policies. Impact defines involvement?

“…In any case, balancing economic and social objectives takes these policies out of the technocratic domain and places them in the heart of political decision-making. Indeed, they concern redistributive policies (Maatsch 2017), which strengthens the need for democratic legitimacy. Moreover, even economic objectives themselves are defined in a wide sense.…”

Cooperação e competição na Zona Euro

“…Contemporaneamente, os (reduzidos) efeitos da competição económica não se traduziriam em desigualdade política, em virtude do quadro de cooperação que se criaria no Conselho. A coordenação macroeconómica reduziria também a conflitualidade que se cria entre os países e a Comissão no momento da fiscalização prévia dos orçamentos dos estados, uma conflitualidade que evidenciou o tamanho da margem de discrição da Comissão na aplicação das regras orçamentais (Maatsch, 2017).…”