New Tasks, Limited Resources: Regional Parliamentary Administrations in EU Affairs

Until the Treaty of Lisbon, the role of regional parliaments in the EU policy-making was mainly limited to controlling their regional executives. The Treaty of Lisbon appears to have given new impetus to the European affairs scrutiny by regional parliaments. However, scepticism remains on the ability of regional parliaments to use the new opportunities, due to the information gap compared to regional and national governments and their comparatively small administrations. The paper seeks to understand how and to what extent regional parliamentary administrations can address the information gap. For this purpose, it discusses the new opportunities for regional parliaments after Lisbon, provides an overview over the general resources of regional parliaments and the tasks of parliamentary administrations and compares these with the resources of the national level. It further elaborates on this through an analysis of Belgian and German regional parliaments.