Intertwined parliamentary arenas: Why parliamentarians attend international parliamentary institutions

Abstract

The internationalisation of political authority elongates the chain of delegation between the citizen and elected representatives. It increases executive dominance while weakening parliamentary control. International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs), parliamentary assemblies affiliated with international organisations, could potentially mitigate the ‘parliamentary deficit’ of global governance but are commonly criticised for their weak authority. This paper revisits this critical perspective and argues that IPIs provide access to information circumventing the privileged access of governments. Thereby, IPIs strengthen national parliaments’ capability to control the executive. This benefit explains the motivation of national MPs to attend IPIs. The study is based on novel data on the attendance of parliamentarians to the sessions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly from 2007 to 2015. The results speak in favour of intertwined parliamentary arenas, as attributes of national parliaments drive attendance. For one, parliaments with higher scrutiny capacity participate more in delegations to IPIs. Moreover, the composition of delegations is related to control incentives, causing a difference in attendance patterns of government and opposition parties.

Does differentiated integration weaken parliamentary involvement? Evidence from the European Union's interparliamentary conferences

“…Based on interviews in the Austrian parliament, Miklin (2013: 32) for example finds that obtaining ‘a fast overview regarding current discussions at the EU level’ is often a key motivation for parliamentary involvement. Lipps (2020: 506), albeit outside of the EU context, suggests that participation in international parliamentary arenas means ‘minimising the information gap with the executive’ and ‘being able to scrutinise foreign policy’. This is not to deny that the opposition might want information to challenge the government, while government supporters might monitor EU policies in their role as party policy specialists (e.g.…”

“…These include the accession cohort of a member state, the host country of an IPC, the proximity of the next election (measured in days and re-scaled by dividing by 365) (Schade and Stavridis, 2021), and the effective number of parliamentary parties . Additionally, parliamentary EU support will be measured as the seat-weighted average party support for European integration of all parliamentary parties, based on data from the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys (Bakker et al, 2020; Polk et al, 2017). The compositions of all parliaments were obtained from Parlgov (Döring and Manow, 2011).…”

“…I start from the premise that IPCs primarily serve as an informational function for national parliaments (e.g. Kreilinger, 2018;Lipps, 2020;Miklin, 2013), but also acknowledge that they might have an additional social purpose in the EU's 'inter-parliamentary field' (Crum and Fossum, 2009). I expect that parliamentarians, whose countries are exempted from EU policies and who, therefore, face weaker information needs and social expectations, participate less in IPCs.…”

Do international parliaments matter? An empirical analysis of influences on foreign policy and civil rights

“…By requiring the decision-making bodies of IGOs to be transparent about their decisions and to justify them in a public forum, IPIs can influence the content of those decisions before they are finalized, and this in turn may affect the policies that governments implement domestically. Lipps (2021) shows that national parliamentarians are more likely to attend IPIs when they have more reasons to mitigate the traditional information asymmetry between executives and legislatures in relation to international issues and negotiations. Establishing whether and how exposure to an international layer of parliamentary scrutiny and co-decision causes shifts in intergovernmental policy outcomes raises significant complexities, and so we set aside this third expectation for the time being.…”

“…Second, recent studies have given us in-depth knowledge of the reasons why IPIs are created and empowered (Cofelice, 2018; Grigorescu, 2015; Lenz, 2019; Lenz et al, 2019; Rocabert et al, 2019; Schimmelfennig et al, 2020; Verdoes, 2020; Winzen and Rocabert, 2021). Third, there are systematic explanations of why individual members of national parliaments engage with IPIs (Lipps, 2021; Malang, 2019; Wagner, 2013).…”