Parliamentary accountability in multilevel governance: what role for parliaments in post-crisis EU economic governance?

Abstract

How has the new structure of European Union (EU) economic governance affected the ability of parliaments (national and European) to scrutinize and control economic policy? Departing from the premise that executive power needs to be matched by appropriate parliamentary control, this contribution argues that parliamentary powers have been compromised in EU economic governance. Although budgetary powers remain formally at the national level, governments' decisions have become constrained and national parliaments find themselves on the losing side of a reinforced two-level game. This loss in parliamentary powers is not compensated at the European level, as at that level political authority is effectively left suspended between the national governments, who are unaccountable as a collective, and the European Commission, which lacks a political mandate of its own. Against this background, a final section identifies guidelines for organizing parliamentary accountability in settings, like EU economic governance, in which executive power has come to be shared across levels.

The Effects of Crises and European Fiscal Governance Reforms on the Budgetary Processes of Member States

“…In the Europeanization literature it has also been argued that the strategic impacts of the EU may favour actors directly connected with the EU (Börzel and Risse, ). Hence, we would expect that the changes in the EU fiscal governance framework have strengthened the role of the executive and lessened the role of the national parliaments (Crum, ; Dawson, ; Moury and Standring, ), which is also characteristic of the delegation mode of fiscal governance. With regard to the implementation phase of the budget process, given the uncertainties created by the crisis conditions and also the higher likelihood of sanctions by the EU when a member state violates the prescribed fiscal rules, the finance ministries are likely to exert more extensive discretionary powers, which is characteristic of the delegation model.…”

“…The six‐pack also institutionalized an important reform that had been introduced as part of Europe 2020 – the European Semester. The aim of the semester process is to ensure that member states coordinate their budgetary and economic policies before national budget plans are compiled (Crum, ; Fabbrini, ).…”

“…Although an increasing number of studies have examined how fiscal governance reforms at the European level came about (Ioannou et al, ; Laffan and Schlosser, ) and how to interpret their nature within the framework of EU integration (Dawson, ; Fabbrini, ; Schimmelfennig, ), there has been limited research on how these reforms have actually influenced budget processes and practices in the member states. While some studies have discussed the resulting increased role of the European Commission in EU economic and fiscal governance (Bauer and Becker, ) and the impacts of these reforms on national parliaments (Crum, : Dawson, ; Hallerberg et al, ), no comparative studies have systematically examined the effects of these reforms on the budgetary processes of member states. As the eventual impact of the European fiscal governance reforms depends on how they affect budgetary processes in member states, it is important to understand what kind of domestic changes they have triggered.…”

The Council’s Amendments to the Country-Specific Recommendations: More than just Cosmetics?

“…The second axis poses the question whether EU governance and the Semester are becoming more supranational or intergovernmental (see Savage and Howarth 2018). Third, scholars aim to situate the Semester's governance structure between technocratic and democratically accountable governance (see Crum 2018). In addition, scholars focus on the implementation of CSRs at the national level (see Deroose and Griesse 2014;Darvas and Leandro 2015;Alcidi and Gros 2015) to assess the overall effectiveness of the Semester.…”

‘It’s a total no-no’: The strategic silence about gender in the European Parliament’s economic governance policies

“…Amongst other things, the EU's recent economic governance regime has been criticized for constitutionalizing austerity through new and more strictly enforced fiscal rules (Bruff, 2014), for being unaccountable to democratically elected bodies (Crum, 2018), and for further subordinating the EU's social goals to its economic priorities (Crespy and Menz, 2015). Feminist scholars have added new layers to this critique by revealing the gendered and racialized impacts of the policies implemented in the governance framework (Bruff and Wöhl, 2016;Kantola and Lombardo, 2017), the dominance of masculine norms within the all-male expert-led fiscal bureaucracy in charge of its implementation (Klatzer and Schlager, 2019;O'Dwyer, 2019), and the sidelining of gender equality concerns and actors (Cavaghan, 2017).…”