Parliamentary Administrations in EU Politics: The Sources and Impact of Diversity

Abstract

National parliaments tend to delegate a range of tasks related to EU affairs scrutiny to their administrations. However, there is considerable variation in the extent to which national parliaments invest in EU affairs staff. This raises two questions: what is the source of this diversity, and what is its impact on the EU affairs scrutiny of national parliaments? This paper argues that greater investments in EU affairs staff are associated with public Euroscepticism, large parliaments and parliaments with strong scrutiny powers. A large EU staff is, in turn, associated with parliaments that are relatively active in EU affairs scrutiny. This is particularly true for the 15 EU member states that joined before 2004.

The mainstreaming of EU affairs: a challenge for parliamentary administrations

“…As the comparative studies (Högenauer et al, 2016;Högenauer & Christiansen, 2015) show that parliamentary staff is involved to a considerable extent in EU affairs scrutiny in all cases, one can of course assume that all national parliamentary administrations in the EU are Europeanised to at least some extent: They all employ EU experts and they all deal with EU affairs. However, there are many things about the Europeanisation of national parliamentary administrations that we do not understand, in large part because there still is a dearth of relevant data: For example, Högenauer and Christiansen (2015) show that the number of EU experts per parliament varies widely, but there is no 'good' explanation in terms of size of the country, EU competences of the parliament or accession date (Högenauer, 2019). This may be in part due to the fact that we do not even fully understand the organisation of EU support.…”