Setting the Parliament’s European Agenda: Exploring Actors and Their Motivations in the German Bundestag

Studies of the way national parliaments deal with European Union (EU) decision-making are by-now widespread. While a lot of research focuses on institutional adaptation such as the creation of EU committees, recent studies have begun to study behaviour. Notably, these studies ask how and why parliaments select issues for closer examination from the wide pool of potential EU topics. They trace this selection variously to the influence of bureaucrats, party politics, or the desire to strengthen or undermine a government’s bargaining power in Brussels. It is puzzling to note, though, that there is very little detailed empirical information on the actors that actually participate in the selection of European topics in parliament and the goals that these actors claim to pursue. This is all the more concerning given that the aforementioned arguments make strong assumptions about precisely these points: what actors matter and what they want. As a first step towards providing an empirical foundation for such assumptions, I present an exploration of the process of selecting European topics in German parliamentary committees. While such an approach is not suitable to test competing hypotheses, I do specify a number of implications about actors and motivations that necessarily have to be observed empirically for any of the above arguments to have at least a chance of being correct.