National Parliaments after Lisbon: Administrations on the Rise?

Abstract

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

research note: studying a new phase of europeanisation of national parliaments

“…As Table 2 demonstrates, most MPs of the two Austrian chambers attending inter-parliamentary committee meetings are from sectoral committees, despite the fact that -internally -EU affairs are still dealt with by the EAC. Conversely, the Belgian Senate has decentralised EU affairs scrutiny to the sectoral committees, but has too few EU staff to allow for specialisation on policy sectors (Högenauer and Neuhold, 2015). In sum, we argue that mainstreaming has varying characteristics, which makes a better understanding of the transformations more urgent.…”

“…Regarding our second dimension, parliamentary practice suggests that the administrative support system plays an important advisory function in most European parliaments today (Högenauer and Neuhold, 2015;van Keulen, 2012). As sectoral committees now increasingly require advice on EU policies and procedures, the result has been growing mainstreaming of EU affairs scrutiny at the administrative level.…”

“…Less resource-intensive options for mainstreaming include a simple transfer of EU support tasks to 'ordinary' committee staff who will have to accept that European issues are part of the work of their sectoral committees (e.g., the Dutch Eerste Kamer, Högenauer, 2015), or putting existing EAC staff in charge of advising sectoral committees on EU affairs (e.g., the Belgian Senate, cf. Högenauer and Neuhold, 2015). As the column entitled 'Staff support for sectoral committees' in Table 2 shows, even among those parliaments that have delegated the competence for EU affairs scrutiny wholly, or in part, to sectoral committees, there are still many cases in which only the EAC has EU experts at its disposal.…”

Redirecting national parliaments: Setting priorities for involvement in EU affairs

“…Jančić, 2012;Neuhold and Strelkov, 2012;Hefftler et al, 2015). The interparliamentary networking produced by EWM, occurring mainly either online between parliamentary administrations or between the Brussels-based representatives of national parliaments, can also be beneficial, resulting in more effective use of EWM and in more regular exchange of information among national parliaments (Högenauer and Neuhold, 2015;Christiansen et al, 2014).…”

“…Parliaments might constitute a 'virtual third chamber', but the question we should ask is whether subsidiarity checks, reasoned opinions and interparliamentary lobbying to reach the yellow card threshold result in tighter cabinet scrutiny and/or more informed citizens. 6 Given that most of the parliamentary activity in the EWM, both in individual chambers or in interparliamentary cooperation at the EU level, is carried out by parliamentary civil servants (Högenauer and Neuhold, 2015), it is doubtful that the mechanism produces higher 'ownership' of EU affairs among domestic MPs. The EWM is also very demanding for those MPs that want to become involved in the checks, as they need knowledge both of EU law and the actual policy area to determine whether a proposal is in breach of the subsidiarity principle.…”