Parliamentary Accountability of the EU Economic Governance

Abstract

The Euro Area crisis has brought about tremendous changes in the economic governance of the European Union (EU) and consequently in the ways the executives at both national and supranational levels of government can be hold to account. By focusing on the interactions between national parliaments and executive actors, this panel discusses the new modes of accountability in this policy area bringing together scholars from political science and law. The first paper examines the debates concerning the EU annual cycle of fiscal and economic surveillance which take place in Irish and Polish national parliaments. It qualitatively studies interactions between the Commissioners, members of government and the parliamentarians to explain the patterns of accountability mechanisms. The second examines the way the fiscal councils may affect parliamentary accountability of the EU economic governance by examining their prospective and actual impact on national legal systems and on the Eurozone as a whole. The third paper offers a two-country case study of the impact of the radical national parties on legislative procedures and examine the role of procedural responses to radical opposition. The final paper examines causal factors behind the actual parliamentary engagement in interparliamentary conferences by applying an actor-oriented approach to compare the parliamentary perception of Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance Conference in Poland and France.