This article takes up recent arguments to strengthen national parliamentary powers in EU decision-making through inter-parliamentary cooperation. By widening the analytical focus from parliaments to the cooperation amongst the parties within parliaments, it seeks to advance the debate in two respects. First, the article aims at providing a more accurate picture about the cooperation going on today. Second, it discusses why the amount of, and the benefits gained from inter-parliamentary cooperation may vary between parties and therefore cooperation may not only affect the power relations between national parliaments and non-parliamentarian actors, but also those within parliaments. Based on the results of a study of the Austrian parliament it is argued that interparliamentary cooperation (a) is more important for opposition parties than for governing parties but that (b) parties can make use of its full potential only when their ideology allows them to integrate into a European party network.
While European issues have, for a long time, played hardly any role in national elections and party politics, the EU has seen a continuous increase in politicization throughout the last decades. So far, however, contestation has been restricted largely to constitutional issues, and has been driven mainly by Eurosceptic parties that challenged mainstream parties' positive attitudes towards EU integration. This article discusses to what extent the euro crisis has added to this a left-right conflict between mainstream parties about their different views on European policies. It argues that the potential for such debates across the EU remains restricted. While the euro crisis has clearly increased the saliency of European issues, overall the incentive structure of mainstream parties in many Member States still works against publicly visible discussions among them. The plausibility of the argument is demonstrated through a comparison of interparty debates on the euro crisis in Austria and Germany.
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