ABSTRACT
A demoi-cratic political system provides institutions and procedures for the representation of both individual citizens and statespeople. Representation in the European Union (EU) has evolved in this direction. The European Parliament (EP) has changed from a consultative, indirectly elected assembly into a directly elected powerful legislator (e.g., Rittberger 2005). Similarly, national parliaments have gradually created committees to monitor integration, information rights and ways to limit governments’ freedom in Brussels (Raunio and Hix 2000; Winzen 2012). These developments at the European and national levels have created the EU’s ‘multilevel parliamentary field’ or system (Crum and Fossum 2009). In order to advance the empirical-analytical research agenda on ‘demoi-
cratization’, we focus on what explains the evolution of the multilevel
national parliaments also exercise authority regarding a shared universe of policy decisions, and their members come from the same countries and parties. This opens up the possibility of compensating for domestic losses of parliamentary authority with European gains. Yet, party members focussing on national politics may also be wary of power shifts as a result of European parliamentarization. Finally, national parliaments have to ratify changes in the EU’s institutional design including decisions to empower the EP. Thus, they get the explicit opportunity to consider their position towards EU parliamentarization. Moreover, national parliaments have regularly contemplated domestic reforms in order to balance the authority losses from treaty changes. It is at least conceivable that their evaluations of EU parliamentarization play a role in domestic reform choices. In this contribution we focus on one side of the interdependent process of
parliamentarization in the EU’s multilevel system: the reactions of national parliaments to the empowerment of the EP. National parliaments are likely to be the drivers of co-evolution. For the EP it is much more difficult to adjust its demands for empowerment to national parliaments: with now 28 member states, the EP will rather rely on generic constitutional arguments such as that majority voting in the Council has to be tied to co-decision (Rittberger and Schimmelfennig 2006). National parliaments, in turn, have only one European-level parliament to take into account. Our argument has two parts, which structure both the theoretical and empiri-
cal analyses. We begin at the micro-level of parliamentary parties. We argue that parliamentary parties take conscious positions towards the EP. In particular, support for parliamentarization at the European level depends on parties’ cultural conservatism (see also Hooghe et al. [2002]). If parties did not take conscious positions on the EP, we would have to wonder whether the EP’s development could have any effects on national institutional choice. In a second step, we move to the institutional level of parliament. Here, we
seek to show that parliamentary evaluations of the EP have an effect on parliamentary oversight institutions in addition to existing explanations. We argue that aggregate institutional support for the EP tells us where national parliaments are on a continuum from competitive to co-operative parliamentarization of the EU’s multilevel system. In competitive parliamentarization, national parliaments feel pressure to counteract the empowerment of their supranational counterpart. In co-operative parliamentarization, EP empowerment does not produce, or even reduces, the pressure for national parliaments to play a strong role in EU decision-making.
