Enhancing the role of national parliaments in the EU's decision-making process has for
sometime been a popular way in which policy-makers have sought to address legitimacy
problems in the European Union, the Early Warning System being only one example of attempting to address the democratic deficit. In response to these developments, an increasing number of scholars has addressed the question of how parliaments make
use of these powers in practice.
Much of the focus here has been on the institutional performance of parliaments as a whole, or on the behavior of MPs and political parties.
In this paper we argue that an important dimension of the process – the role of
parliamentary officials – has been ignored in the literature.
Our first empirical observations indicate that the effective use of the new
Lisbon powers involves a substantial degree of administrative networking and inter-parliamentary cooperation on the level of officials, given
that national parliaments are required to cooperate more systematically
with one another and need to develop a high level of technical expertise. In order to substantiate these claims, the paper examines the work of the representatives of national parliaments to the European Parliament, demonstrating that multilevel representative democracy in the EU actually implies the creation and empowerment of new bureaucratic networks.
