What is my Autonomy of Negotiation? Analysing the Autonomy of the Austrian Federal Executive in the Council of the EU Vis-à-Vis its Domestic Parliament(s)

The paper examines the negotiation autonomy of the Austrian negotiator in the Environment Council vis-à-vis the Austrian national and subnational parliaments. When most studies adopt a bottom-up approach focusing on the control mechanisms and their use by the (sub)national parliaments, this paper concentrates on the actions and on the negotiation behaviour of the Austrian negotiator (the agent) vis-à-vis the Austrian (sub)national parliaments (the principals). The case of Austria is interesting since the Austrian parliament was considered, when the country entered the European Union in 1995, as one of the strongest parliaments in the EU. Most recently, several studies showed however that despite its strong formal powers, the Austrian parliaments do not fully use the full range of constraining tools to scrutinize the government in European Affairs. More precisely, the paper addresses the question how the Austrian agent deals with these (sub)national parliamentary constraints in its negotiations taking place in the Environment Council. Hence, the paper questions the impact of the scrutiny of domestic parliaments on the Austrian representative negotiating in the Environment Council. It therefore examines the impact on the agent behaviour of the degree to which the Austrian parliaments activate the scrutiny mechanisms at their disposal. Moreover, it also tackles the question on how the national and subnational parliaments interact and what consequences does it have on parliamentary control and on the executive autonomy. Therefore, this research aims at offering a multi-level understanding of the European decision-making processes by analyzing the interactions between the European, national and regional levels The paper presents new empirical data on four legislative decision-making processes in the environmental policy sector, collected through semi-structured interviews with Austrian representatives in the Council, parliamentarians and administrators. The analysis also relies on a review of the literature and an analysis of official documents.