Questioning Europe: Explaining the Variation in EU-Related Parliamentary Questions in Europe’s National Parliaments

This paper examines the use of parliamentary questions as a tool for members of national parliaments to oversee their governments’ actions in regard to EU policy. In an age of increasing Euroskepticism and concerns about the democratic deficit, one potential solution is to increase the role of the national parliaments. However, there is substantial variation in how involved the national parliaments are in European politics. It is important that we understand why some parliaments are more involved than others, which will also help us understand if they could all realistically be involved enough to help bridge the democratic deficit. Parliamentary questions are one of the ways that national parliaments can play a role in European affairs, and this paper presents original data on the number and type of parliamentary questions and attempts to explain the cross-national variation. Parliamentary questions are of particular interest because they differ from other types of parliamentary involvement, such as transposition or the European Affairs Committees, in that they are more individual, more public, and less institutionalized. They are also available to the opposition. Therefore, as expected, I find that some of the factors affecting parliamentary involvement through questions differ from those that have been found to matter for other types of involvement. In particular, the typical balance of power between the executive and parliament is less predominant than in other research and actually works in the opposite direction. Public Euroskepticism matters in an interesting (and somewhat unexpected) ways, in that short-term spikes in Euroskepticism lead to more EU-related questions, while higher long-term levels of Euroskepticism reduces these types of questions.