The Implementation of EU Law in the Czech and Slovak Parliaments: No Ado about Something?

EU law has an immense influence on national legal orders, yet there has been a little consensus on how high the influence actually is (see the "Delor's myth"). In order to explore the situation in the Czech and Slovak republics, I created a dataset processing all law proposals tabled to both parliaments between 1998 and 2013. Apart from various information on EU influence on each proposal, the dataset also collects many variables that code content and procedural aspects of all proposals. Research on parliamentary behaviour in EU affairs concentrates primarily on ex ante control of governments. Yet in many Member States the parliaments are also involved in the adoption of laws that implement EU acts. Due to their legal tradition, the CR and Slovakia belong to the group of countries where majority of EU obligations must be fulfilled through laws. Also, mainly the Czech Chamber of Deputies has enjoyed a strong position vis a vis the executive and does not always follow its will. My goal is quite simple: Explore if the behaviour of deputies (and parliaments as a whole) differs between adoption of EU-induced and purely-domestic law proposals. Formally the rules of procedure do not treat them separately, so the hypothesis stands that there is no difference. The preliminary results however disprove the hypothesis and show that the EU-induced proposals are for example statistically much less controversial than the other group. The paper analyse if the variances are caused by some objective differences between both groups or simply lack of interests of deputies in EU-related law proposals (here the research will be corroborated by interviews). The latter conclusion might have damaging effect to all recent and prospective efforts to increase involvement of national parliaments in EU affairs.