Supporting Parliamentary Behaviour in European Union Affairs – The Power of Parliamentary Bureaucracy

In recent years, the power of bureaucracy in parliaments received considerable yet rather implicit attention in scholarly debates and among the general public. Especially in EU affairs and with the Lisbon Treaty coming into force, national legislatures have arguably increased their influence over their governments. Newly established structures and procedures of parliaments are argued to strengthen their formal scrutiny capabilities, resulting in a 'reparliamentarisation' in the EU (Raunio/Hix 2000). As a consequence, conceptual and empirical research focuses so far on the emergence of new institutional structures in national legislatures such as standing committees for EU affairs and on the configuration and application of the formal scrutiny rights (Raunio 2009; Karlas 2012; Winzen 2012, 2014). Yet we lack more systematic knowledge about the relevance of bureaucracy in national legislatures. More precisely, we lack a theoretically informed understanding of what 'bureaucracy' means in the context of parliaments. Moreover, we lack explanations for the varying power of bureaucracy across and within national parliaments, taking sectoral differences into account. Lastly, we know very little about the consequences of these power patterns for legislative decision-making and parliamentary accountability. The proposed paper aims to contribute to this growing debate in two regards. Firstly, it offers a novel theoretical framework to identify the key explanatory features for the power of parliamentary bureaucracies in legislative decision-making, most notably in EU and EEA affairs. Secondly, it conducts a pilot study comparing the power of bureaucracy in national legislatures in EU/EEA affairs in Germany, Sweden, and Norway.