Parliamentary Responses to the European Integration in CEE: The impact of openness dimension

Literature dealing with parliamentary responses to European integration and parliamentary scrutiny of European affairs has long claimed that ‘new’ member states from Central and Eastern Europe have adapted to European integration just as well or maybe even better that the ‘older’ EU members. However, this is mostly due to the fact that in those studies the quality of parliamentary response to European integration was solely equated with the institutional capacity of the parliament to hold the members of the executive branch accountable for their actions in the sphere of European affairs. When the conceptualization of parliamentary responses is expanded to include other parliamentary functions as the deliberation of salient matters and informing the public about these issues, member states form the CEE are shown to have adapted to the European integration significantly worse than other EU members.