Parliaments in the Euro Crisis: Can the Losers of Integration Still Fight Back?

Abstract

The Eurozone crisis challenges the scrutiny systems of national parliaments: many instruments tackling the crisis were established outside the EU legal framework; the crisis management has generally been dominated by European and national executives and shows that the crisis did play an important role with regard to plenary EU debates in many national parliaments. Beyond debates, however, the scrutiny of the crisis management has surprisingly been 'business as usual' for most parliamentary chambers. This further cements the gap between formally strong and active and formally weak and inactive parliaments.

Signals to Their Parliaments? Governments’ Use of Votes and Policy Statements in the EU Council

“…Our analysis stops short of establishing the extent to which this form of government responsiveness to parliamentary scrutiny is also noted by domestic actors, and in particular whether national parliaments and their committees actually pay attention to the EU votes and decision records. However, several extensive and rigorous accounts exist with regard to these questions (Auel and Höing, ; Gattermann and Hefftler ; Hoerner ). Based on these authors’ findings – that parliaments vary greatly in terms of both the formal and actual scrutiny activities of their governments – we remain convinced that the scrutiny activities carried out by national parliaments on governments’ activities in EU affairs can indeed explain our results above.…”

“…The only consensus so far appears to be that voting behaviour and coalition formation in the Council is an expression of a series of repeated games where patterns do appear, but where no permanent, stable positions are consistently confirmed over time and across all policy domains. In addition, it is clear that most existing studies do not consider any domestic political actors other than governments and voters (but see Auel and Höing (), Auel et al . () and Puntscher et al .…”

“…The only consensus so far appears to be that voting behaviour and coalition formation in the Council is an expression of a series of repeated games where patterns do appear, but where no permanent, stable positions are consistently confirmed over time and across all policy domains. In addition, it is clear that most existing studies do not consider any domestic political actors other than governments and voters (but see Auel and Höing (2014), Auel et al (2015) and Puntscher et al (2013) for recent qualitative work that considers national parliaments in Eurocrisis negotiations). The most notable exceptions are the studies by Finke (2017) and Stasavage (2004), which find that governments do not vote 'sincerely' in the EU Council, but instead seek to build reputations through their signals to domestic stakeholders (see also Schneider et al, 2010, although they do not focus on voting in the Council).…”

National Parliaments and EU Fiscal Integration

“…34 An empirical study suggests that in no less than 16 out of 27 NPs, more than 40% of all EU debates held in the period 2010-2012 addressed the euro crisis, while in 11 NPs, the percentage was 50% or higher. 35 This discursive element of the crisis is important, 36 because, as Curtin underlines, publicity and deliberation are 'truly distinctive qualities' of parliaments, especially in the EU context. 37 Chalmers also convincingly argues that NPs are the only institutions in the Union capable of polity building, which is necessary to transform the political identities of EU citizens and legitimise what has now become a new EU fiscal settlement.…”

Redirecting national parliaments: Setting priorities for involvement in EU affairs

“…The most recent research suggests that there is considerable variation between national parliaments in their involvement in euro crisis governance. Differences between more active and weaker legislatures have been aggravated, with the latter in particular struggling to establish any real control over euro area decisions (Auel and Höing, 2014;Benz, 2013;Deubner, 2013, Rittberger andWinzen, 2015). The inevitable conclusion must be that domestic parliamentary scrutiny of European economic governance is far from optimal.…”