Parliaments in the EU economic governance before and after the COVID crisis

Abstract

The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic that challenged governance systems around the world have resulted in the marginalization of parliamentary actors vis-a-vis the executives who assumed a predominant role in responding to the crisis. In the European Union (EU), the recovery plan and the Next Generation fund approved by the Heads of State and Government in 2020 accelerated the process of centralization of decision-making by the executive actors (i.e. EU Council and the European Council, Commission and the Eurogroup). Despite its budgetary rights, the EP remains an onlooker for most of pandemic-related decisions, as it did during the euro crisis, and NPs have been forced to operate in an ‘emergency mode’ without adequate tools for democratic deliberation and scrutiny. These circumstances require various adaptive strategies and capacities from the European parliaments to be able to perform their functions as legislators, scrutinizers and accountability fora. Against this background, the underlying goal of the two proposed panels is to analyse in what ways the changing dynamics, and the recent (re-)balancing of powers between intergovernmental and supranational institutions, affected parliaments and the nature of democratic accountability in the EU economic governance. They gather interdisciplinary papers, representing both political science and law perspective, which address the above query taking into account both national parliaments’ as well as the EP’s reactions to crisis-related changes as well as the inter-parliamentary dynamics. The panels build on a special issue project which is due to be published by the Journal of Legislative Studies in the second half of 2022.

Title	Details
National opposition parties within the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance in the EU	View Paper Details
Parliamentary Scrutiny of Budgetary Emergency Measures: From the Great Financial Crisis to the Covid-19 Pandemic	View Paper Details
The Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly: a transnational accountability forum in a time of crisis?	View Paper Details
Wasting valuable opportunities? The Irish parliamentary reaction to economic crises	View Paper Details