Federalism and Parliamentarism: Linking Two Research Agendas

Abstract

For a long time, the executives and their role in multi-level systems have been the main research interest of scholars dealing with research on federalism. As research agendas are always linked to empirical developments, parliaments as the usual “losers” in federal and multi-level systems have been only a peripheral topic. While parliaments lost more and more legislative power to the higher political levels, the executives have been the one who linked different political levels and who participated in political decision making processes on higher political levels. However, this empirical situation seems to be in change after the Treaty of Lisbon. After decades of strengthening the executives, a structural EU “democratic deficit” has been attested, and the EU reacted step by step by giving more rights to parliaments on all political levels to participate in EU decision processes (supranational, national, subnational). Parliaments are using their new rights politically and are on the way to become actors in the EU multi-level system. Parliamentarism research started to create new theoretical approaches on a “multi-level parliamentary system” (Crum/Fossum 2009; Maurer 2009; Abels/Eppler 2011). The target of this panel is to link federalism research with parliamentarism research. Where are the scientific bridges between federalism and parliamentarism research agendas? Comparative research on constitutional rights, interdependence of federal arrangements and parliaments strength, questions of Europeanisation, parliamentary actor´s quality in multi-level systems, modes of interaction with state and non-state actors, characteristics of interparliamentary relations (horizontal, vertical) both, in its political system and “foreign relations”, comparing different policy fields, analysing processes inside parliaments (administration, parties in multi-level systems etc.). The panel is open for papers dealing with questions in the intersection set of parliamentarism and federalism research. Papers on the meta level concerning the linkage between the two research agendas are most welcome.

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