Euroscepticism and the Early Warning System

Abstract

With the Treaty of Lisbon, national Parliaments obtained a direct role in the legislative process of the European Union (EU). When the Commission releases a legislative proposal, each national Parliament has eight weeks to issue a Reasoned Opinion stating that the draft violates the EU principle of subsidiarity if they wish to do so. This article provides context on this so‐called Early Warning System (EWS), and then studies empirically when national Parliaments issue Reasoned Opinions under the EWS. A within‐between panel regression covering all 28 EU countries for 2010–16 leads to novel findings on the issuance of Reasoned Opinions. In particular, there is no robust statistical evidence that variations in public attitudinal euroscepticism in a country affect the number of Reasoned Opinions issued by its Parliament. In contrast, electoral euroscepticism as measured by the election of eurosceptic Parliaments is found to have a strongly significant across‐country effect on the number of Reasoned Opinions.

Enlargement and exit: The origins of Article 50

“…This expansion of competences may also have contributed to the desire for an exit clause. Its more direct effect was to increase support for the subsidiarity principle and for an Early Warning System to police it (Huysmans, 2018).…”

Substance and subsidiarity: the economic dimension of conflict in the early warning system

“…These fixed effects control for two important country characteristics. First, their propensity to issue ROs, which depends, for instance, on their level of Euroscepticism or their parliamentary strength (Auel, Rozenberg, and Tacea 2015;Gattermann and Hefftler 2015;Huysmans 2019a;Williams 2016;Winzen 2012). Second, their tendency to have a lot of coissued ROs across all dyads they are part of.…”

“…The emerging quantitative literature on the EWS has so far focused on explaining the issuance of ROs. Researchers have established, among other findings, that Eurosceptic Parliaments and Parliaments with minority governments issue more ROs (Auel, Rozenberg, and Tacea 2015;Gattermann and Hefftler 2015;Huysmans 2019a;Williams 2016). While we use the same source data on ROs, our focus is on the co-issuance of ROs and hence on dyads of Parliaments, rather than on Parliaments in isolation.…”

The Early Warning System and policymaking in the European Union

“…To date, most scholarly attention has focused on explaining the variation between parliaments' decisions to submit ROs. For an excellent overview of this literature, we refer to Gattermann and Hefftler (2015), Williams (2016), Malang et al (2017) and Huysmans (2018). Contrary to explaining the variation between parliaments' use of ROs, we are primarily interested in their impact for EU policymaking more broadly.…”