The rise of international parliamentary institutions: Purpose and legitimation

Abstract

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.

The Existence of Courts and Parliaments in Regional Organizations: A Case of Democratic Control?

“…Functional theories have a hard time explaining the existence of regional parliaments, as these promise few efficiency gains "while generating potentially significant sovereignty costs" (Lenz et al 2019(Lenz et al : 1096. Some of the literature explains their existence by their function as symbolic expressions of modern representative democracy borrowed so as to increase democratic control within ROs (Rocabert and Schimmelfennig 2018). The state-like-threshold thesis discussed above proceeds from a similar assumption (Zürn 2014).…”

“…The article makes several original contributions to the existing literature: First, based on one of the most comprehensive datasets on ROs, the Comparative Regional Organization Project (CROP), the article provides descriptive statistics regarding the growth of organs associated with the democratic control of executives, in particular courts and parliaments, for the full set of ROs. It thus goes beyond existing studies, which worked with about half of the organizations in our dataset (Lenz et al 2019;Rocabert and Schimmelfennig 2018). Second, the article provides the first comprehensive test of alternative explanations for the existence of courts and parliaments in ROs.…”

How Globalisation and Mediatisation Challenge our Democracies

“…With respect to upwards de‐nationalisation, Rocabert et al. () find that the task expansion of international organisations has systematically triggered the creation of international parliamentary institutions as a strategy to enhance democratic legitimacy of international authority. In the same vein, Freyburg et al.…”

“…Interestingly enough, however, de-nationalised policy-making has been faced with and had to respond to what we could call responsiveness pressures. With respect to upwards de-nationalisation, Rocabert et al (2017) find that the task expansion of international organisations has systematically triggered the creation of international parliamentary institutions as a strategy to enhance democratic legitimacy of international authority. In the same vein, Freyburg et al (2017a) show that international trans-governmental networks -classically focused on enhancing problem-solving and thus geared towards responsibility rather than responsiveness -have developed elements of democratic governance that also address responsiveness, for example by integrating alternative forms of public participation such as public consultations or stakeholder involvement.…”

Just an Illusion? Democratization in the International Realm

“…NCCR Democracy research shows, indeed, that the parliamentarization of IOs has made important progressboth in the global and the European context. Until the 1990s, only around 10 percent of the world's most important organizations have had International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs); since then, the share has increased to over 30 percent (Rocabert et al 2017). During the same time period, the European Parliament (EP), the world's most powerful IPI, has developed from a largely consultative organ to a directly elected parliament with codecision powers over most of the legislation of the European Union (EU), the EU budget, and the appointment of the European Commission.…”