This article revisits the balancing act between independence and accountability at the European Central Bank (ECB). It contrasts procedural and substantive concepts of accountability, and challenges the mainstream idea that independence and accountability can be reconciled through narrow mandates, the indiscriminate increase of transparency, the creation of multiple channels of accountability, and the active use of judicial review. These assumptions form the pillars of a procedural type of accountability that promises to resolve the independence/accountability dilemma but fails to do so in practice. The article brings evidence to show how ECB accountability has become a complex administrative exercise that focuses on the procedural steps leading up to monetary and supervisory decisions while simultaneously limiting substantive accountability. The failure to acknowledge the trade‐off between independence and accountability (said to be ‘two sides of the same coin’) has resulted in a tendency to privilege the former over the latter.

The establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) raised expectations regarding the ability of the European Parliament (EP) to hold the European Central Bank (ECB) accountable for its decisions. This article examines the accountability interactions between the two institutions in the first years of the functioning of the SSM (2013–18). The focus is on the extent to which the EP contests ECB supervisory decisions in practice through letters and public hearings. The analysis shows a frequently‐used infrastructure of political accountability that is however limited in ensuring the contestation of ECB conduct in banking supervision. The study identifies problems with the performance of the EP as an accountability forum and with the tight confidentiality rules of the SSM, which allow the ECB to silence contestation on many politically salient issues. The findings are based on an innovative analytical framework on the study of accountability interactions.

This article introduces a new normative framework for analysing accountability in the European Union's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The framework is anchored in four normative 'goods' that accountability is supposed to ensure: openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness. All of these can be achieved in a procedural or substantive way, depending on whether actors are held accountable for the quality of their decision-making processes or for the actual merit of their decisions. Transposed to EMU, this conceptualisation shows both the payoffs and trade-offs of prioritising procedural accountability. Using different examples across EMU governance, the article illustrates how current mechanisms of political, legal, and administrative accountability predominantly evaluate the procedures followed by EU institutions when performing their tasks. While such an approach can bring clarity, predictability, and autonomy for the actors involved, it distracts attention from the substantive assessment of EMU decisions. The article contributes to the EMU accountability literature by going beyond principalagent expectations of democratic control rooted in the nation-state or legal debates about principles for accountable behaviour found in EU Treaties. The EMU, and the EU more broadly, need a different perspective on accountability focused on generally-applicable standards for holding power to account.

Parliamentary questions are an essential tool of legislative oversight. However, the extent to which they are effective in controlling the executive remains underspecified both theoretically and methodologically. This article advances a systematic framework for evaluating the effectiveness of parliamentary questions drawing on principal-agent theory, the public administration literature on accountability and communication research. The framework is called the 'Q&A approach to legislative oversight' based on the premise that the study of parliamentary questions (Q) needs to be linked to their respective answers (A) and examined together (Q&A) at the microlevel as an exchange of claims between legislative and executive actors. Methodologically, the Q&A approach to legislative oversight offers a step-by-step guide for qualitative content analysis of Q&A that can be applied to different legislative oversight contexts at different levels of governance. It is argued that the effectiveness of Q&A depends on the strength of the questions asked and the responsiveness of answers provided, which are correspondingly operationalised. To illustrate the merits of the approach, the article includes a systematic case study on the relationship between the European Parliament and the European Central Bank in banking supervision (2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018), showing the connection between specific institutional settings and the effectiveness of parliamentary questions.

This book provides the first in-depth empirical study of the European Parliament's powers of scrutiny of the executive in the European Union (EU) political system, focusing on the politically salient field of the Economic and Monetary Union. The expansion of executive decision-making during the euro crisis was accompanied by an empowerment of the European Parliament through legislative oversight. This book examines how the European Parliament exercises that oversight on a day-to-day basis and thus contributes to political accountability at the EU level. Building on an innovative analytical framework for the study of parliamentary questions and answers, Adina Akbik sheds light on the European Parliament's possibilities and limitations to hold EU executive bodies accountable more generally. Case studies cover the period 2012 to 2019 and include the European Central Bank in banking supervision, the European Commission, the Eurogroup, and the Economic and Financial Affairs Council. This title is Open Access.