International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) have become an established feature of international politics. While scholars of international institutions have extensively studied why states delegate to international organizations (IOs) in general, they have said little about the creation of parliamentary bodies. Moreover, IPIs do not fit the functions commonly attributed to international delegation. By differentiating between general-purpose and taskspecific IOs, we hypothesize that general-purpose IOs establish and maintain parliamentary bodies that serve their legitimation needs. A nested quantitative and qualitative analysis based on an original dataset on the emergence of IPIs and case studies on the reform of the Economic Community of West African States and the development of the Pacific Islands Forum supports this explanation.

When do parliaments debate European Union policies? Normative arguments suggest that debates enhance government accountability. Others warn of government bias, declining debate near elections, and parties avoiding Eurosceptic publics. Our conclusions are more differentiated. We argue that rank-and-file parliamentarians rather than leaders initiate debates. Political incentives guide their debate selection towards salient policies in the countries in which voters care most. However, where the motivation Eurosceptic publics provide and institutions facilitating rank-and-file agenda-setting are lacking, EU law-making and European Council priorities will raise little parliamentary attention. Analysis of original data, using a Bayesian and multilevel framework, lends credibility to our views. Claims of a government bias, election effects, or trends towards more debate are unlikely to hold in all countries.

This chapter lays out the theoretical framework for the study of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs). First, it argues that IPIs display few of the functional benefits that are commonly associated with the delegation of competences to international institutions. Second, it claims that the assumption of normatively committed member states of international organizations (IOs) does not explain either the weakness of IPIs, their appearance in many IOs composed of non-democratic states, or their absence from IOs with a solid democratic membership. Third, we suggest that the creation and empowerment of IPIs is better understood as a legitimation strategy that governments employ strategically in response to challenges to the legitimacy of the organization. Maintaining or improving the legitimacy of an IO is important because it enhances the stability of cooperation and prevents the disruption of its operation, and international parliamentarization is specifically useful when democratic legitimacy is the standard by which relevant audiences judge an IO. Finally, we identify six structural conditions that generate variation in the normative cost–benefit calculus of governments. These relate to institutional characteristics of the IO itself (authority, purpose, and scope), as well as its domestic and international environment (democracy, governance failure, and diffusion).

As a result of the spread of International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs), international organisations face crucial questions of representational design. We introduce a distinction between citizen-centred and state-centred IPIs in international organisations (IO). Drawing on original data, we show that, even though parliaments might seem likely to foster citizen representation in the international realm, they in fact often follow state-centred representational designs. We further find that citizen-centred IPIs are a near exclusive phenomenon of a few, democratic regional integration projects. Given the prevalence of state-centred representational designs, we conclude that IPIs’ potential to represent different cross-border communities, concerns, and conflict lines than intergovernmental IO bodies remains institutionally limited. IPIs are thus unlikely to challenge these bodies in similar ways as often observed in the relationship between the European Parliament and the European Union's Council of Ministers.