Parliamentary questions and oversight in the European Union

Abstract

Delegation in the European Union (EU) involves a series of principal‐agent problems, and the various chains of delegation involve voters, parties, parliaments, governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament. While the literature has focused on how government parties attempt to monitor EU affairs through committees in national parliaments and through Council committees at the EU level, much less is known about the strategies opposition parties use to reduce informational deficits regarding European issues. This article argues that the European Parliament (EP) offers opposition parties an arena to pursue executive oversight through the use of written parliamentary questions. Using a novel dataset on parliamentary questions in the EP, this article examines why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) ask questions of specific Commissioners. It transpires that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to ask questions of Commissioners. Questions provide these parties with inexpensive access to executive scrutiny. This finding has implications for the study of parliamentary delegation and party politics inside federal legislatures such as the EP.

A Not So Technocratic Executive? Everyday Interaction between the European Parliament and the Commission

“…For example, written parliamentary questions 1 to commissioners offer the EP a means to pursue executive oversight, an opportunity used in particular by MEPs from opposition parties that are not represented in the Council (Proksch and Slapin 2011). 2 Such changes have come into being not only through grand Treaty revisions but also through daily bargaining over competence between EU institutions (Farrell and Heritier 2007;Moury 2007).…”

Parliamentary questions as strategic party tools

“…We know that opposition parties are more active in asking questions than government parties (Green-Pedersen 2010;Martin 2011a;Proksch and Slapin 2011;Sánchez de Dios and Wiberg 2011). Government and opposition parties have opposing interests: the government parties (usually) want to remain within the coalition and are unlikely to 'rock the boat' by asking parliamentary questions.…”

Election proximity and representation focus in party-constrained environments

“…Representatives use them for a wide range of purposes: to request information from the executive, to gain publicity, to surf a wave of anti-governmental popular sentiment, to foster their reputation on a particular policy field, as well as for strategic electoral signals to the selectorate and the electorate (Wiberg, 1995;Russo and Wiberg, 2010;Bailer, 2011;Proksch and Slapin, 2011) But in reality the vast majority of parliamentary questions are written questions, unknown to most people. As Green-Pedersen states, "(w)ritten questions, the vast majority in most countries, rarely receive much direct attention " (2010: 350).…”