The concept of multilevel governance has travelled from the world of (political) science to the world of real politics. However, in both realms, the focus has been primarily on the executive side of policy-making, discussing the role of various layers of government in multilevel polities. This paper shifts the attention to the parliamentary side. Starting point is that democratic legitimacy in multilevel systems inherently needs a multilevel type of organisation. For federal member states of the EU this implies that parliamentary control on and input in EU policies should be organized through a combination of subnational, national (federal) and European parliamentary channels.
In this paper we, firstly, argue that the EU is in want of a genuine system of democratic legitimacy and that representation through parliamentary assemblies is a crucial element of democratic legitimacy. Next, we contend that the EU as a multilevel system needs a multilevel parliamentary system. We take stock of the literature on national parliaments and the EU and add the subnational layer in order to develop a research agenda for a three-level parliamentary system. We present a strategy for a comparative study of multilevel parliamentary systems starting from the empirical data of the Flemish-Belgian-European case.
