The European Parliament as an Accountability Forum

Maricut-Akbik, Adina

doi:10.1017/9781108886611

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 178 publications

(327 reference statements)

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“…More than the courts and the streets, however, the primary forum of institutional accountability for the ECB is the European Parliament, and especially the quarterly Monetary Dialogue hearings during which the ECB president responds to questions from members of the European Parliament (MEPs) (Akbik 2022). In the years 2009-15, structural adjustment and fiscal consolidation had featured prominently in MEPs' remarks during those hearings-out of 11 topics identified in a topic model analysis, macroeconomic adjustment programs were the most discussed (Ferrara et al 2022).…”

Section: Deflationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank

Braun,

Di Carlo,

Diessner

et al. 2024

Perspect. polit.

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Monetary and financial integration has been shown to increase the pressure on states to liberalize social and labor market policies. If structures do not come with instruction sheets, how do monetary regime pressures translate into policy? Through a case study of the euro area, we show that central banks play an underappreciated role in this process. Using mixed methods to analyze a large amount of data, including the complete corpus of speeches, we trace the evolution of the European Central Bank’s advocacy for structural reforms between 1999 and 2019. To explain the ECB’s activism in a policy area beyond its mandate, we theorize the ECB as navigating a dilemma between governability and legitimacy. Handed a monetary regime under which flexible labor markets were seen as a condition for governability, the ECB saw no alternative but to push governments toward structural reforms, despite the reputational risks. The ECB ended its advocacy when increasing political backlash coincided with a structural regime shift from an inflationary to a deflationary environment.

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Section: Deflationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank

Braun,

Di Carlo,

Diessner

et al. 2024

Perspect. polit.

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show abstract

“…156 In the analysis proposed here, procedural law can, nevertheless, be a means to support the strengthening of parliamentary accountability, which is much needed in the current institutional practice. 157 It follows from the above that when executive bodies act in the structural conditions of constitutive powers, judicial review is significant only in interaction with other means of accountability. 158 The need for complementarity is particularly evident in the case of monetary policy, given the scale of impacts of decisions taken by central banks.…”

Section: Is Weiss As Good As It Gets? Avenues For Rethinking the Role...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and discretion in monetary policy and in the banking union: Complexity between high politics and administration

Mendes

2023

COLA

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The controversy over the degree of judicial review of monetary policy decisions triggered by the contrasting Weiss judgments of the German Federal Constitutional Court and of the Court of Justice of the European Union invites an inquiry into the role of law in areas characterized by a high degree of political and technical complexity. This article singles out the structural conditions that qualify complexity in specific instances of decision-making: prognostic assessments, goal-oriented decisions, marked by uncertainty, legal indeterminacy, and discretion. These traits characterize both monetary policy decisions and some regulatory decisions taken within the banking union, such as the setting of minimum requirements for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL) and the calculation of the leverage ratios of credit institutions (Livret A judgments). Irrespective of the very distinct formal-institutional legal frameworks of these two policy fields, in those conditions legality may be determined by the discretionary choices of the decision-maker. For this reason, they impact the court’s deployment of legal principles, namely proportionality and careful and impartial examination. This cross-sector comparison sheds light on the relative specificity of monetary policy, and leads to rejecting the transposition of a distinction between “high politics” and “ordinary administration” to EU law, as a means of both explaining and guiding different degrees of judicial review in conditions of complexity. The different constitutional relevance of monetary policy decisions and of “ordinary” banking supervision requires not a distinction that can rationalize judicial review, but a full consideration of the role that the law must have in supporting non-judicial accountability. judicial review of administrative discretion, complex technical and economic assessments, monetary policy, proportionality, banking union, principle of careful and impartial examination

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“…In economic governance, Dionigi (2020) has linked the nationality of MEPs and their country's fiscal status with their propensity to ask questions in the Economic Dialogues with their own government. Although there are a few descriptive studies that examine the types of questions asked across political groups (Guinaudeau and Costa 2021; Akbik 2022), nationality remains the key explanation for MEPs' behaviour in legislative oversight.…”

Section: The Theoretical Debate: Drivers Of Behaviour Amongst Mepsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, we construct an original dataset of 505 parliamentary questions based on a new type of committee hearings institutionalised after the euro crisis—known as the Economic Dialogues (de la Parra 2017; Dionigi 2020). Although the EP holds Economic Dialogues with other EU bodies and individual member states, we investigate the Economic Dialogues with the Commission because this is the institution responsible for proposing economic and social policy recommendations and is hence typically associated with EU policy‐making in the field (Akbik 2022, chap. 5).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Ideology and Nationality: Drivers of Legislative Oversight in the European Parliament's Economic Dialogues

Maricut-Akbik

Migliorati

2022

J of Common Market Studies

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What drives the behaviour of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in legislative oversight? In this article, we explore the interplay between the ideology and nationality of MEPs in policy fields where the two dimensions are likely to come into conflict. Focusing on EU socio‐economic governance, we collect an original dataset of parliamentary questions asked during the Economic Dialogues with the European Commission (2012–2019). By means of content analysis, we detect variation in MEPs' preferences relating to two dimensions central to this field, that is, economic effectiveness and social inequality. We argue that the variation in MEPs' concerns can be explained to different degrees by their ideology and nationality. We find that ideology plays a highly significant role in shaping the type of questions posed in legislative oversight; however, the nationality of MEPs is also an important driver of behaviour, especially when a member state is disproportionately affected by EU measures.

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The European Parliament as an Accountability Forum

Cited by 14 publications

References 178 publications

Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank

Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank

Law and discretion in monetary policy and in the banking union: Complexity between high politics and administration

Between Ideology and Nationality: Drivers of Legislative Oversight in the European Parliament's Economic Dialogues

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