The Strategies of National Parliamentary Party-Groups in EU-Affairs: Inter- and Intra-Parliamentary Variation

During the last few years, scholarly attention for national parliaments in the EU has expanded from merely comparing the formal rights that parliaments have available, to analysing their actual behaviour and activities in EU decision-making (see, e.g., Auel/Rozenberg/Tacea 2015). So far, however, most of these studies share two characteristics: First, they have focused predominantly on ‘official’ activities within parliaments like, for example, the amount of EU related discussions in parliamentary committees and the plenary, or the number of binding motions directed towards the government and (reasoned) opinions directed directly towards the European Commission. Hence, we still know rather little about the role of possible alternative (extra-parliamentary) channels that parliamentary actors may use to (a) get the information they need and (b) make their voices heard in EU affairs like the use of public media, or the cooperation with parliaments/party fellows from other member states and national interest groups. Second, most studies dealing with national parliamentary control in EU affairs so far have treated parliaments by-and-large as unitary actors and have looked primarily at possible variation between parliaments. Yet, there may also be significant differences in the strategies applied between the main actors within parliament – party groups. Such differences might not only be caused by their formal status (whether they are in government or in opposition; see, e.g., Auel and Benz 2005 & Holzhacker 2002) but also by their ideological profiles (e.g. their attitudes towards EU integration, their position on the Left-Right- or GAL-TAN dimension). As a first step to fill this gap, this paper therefore seeks to explore such differences through an in-depth qualitative case study of the strategies adopted by the party groups in the Austrian and the Dutch parliaments in EU affairs generally, and especially with regard to the Eurocrisis.