The Motivation (or Lack of It) Behind the Engagement in Interparliamentary Cooperation: National Parliaments and the Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance

Most of the empirical literature on national parliaments’ (NPs) participation in interparliamentary cooperation focuses either on the ‘activity level’ with regard to interparliamentary conferences (IPCs), or the hindrances in their institutionalization and performance (Cooper 2016; Lupo and Fasone 2016; Kreilinger 2015 for an overview). To date, it misses accounting for the causal factors behind the actual parliamentary engagement in these fora. The existing scholarship also lacks a comparative research looking at how different NPs perceive the same IPCs and their own EU-related roles in them. Against this backdrop, this paper will undertake an analysis of the driving forces behind NPs involvement in the interparliamentary cooperation looking at the example of the IPC on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance established by the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (SECG Conference). Now, that the Conference has over 3 years of operational experience (since adopting its rules of procedure) it is time to examine how its main participants evaluate its operation in order to detect the motivational and causal factors behind their further engagement. By applying an actor-oriented approach this paper will compare the parliamentary perception of SECG Conference in Poland and France thus providing a non-euro and Eurozone member perspective. This will be a starting point to a broader cross-country analysis. The project might yield interesting results when it comes to elucidating the differences in NPs’ “role perception” as accountability agents and “EU players” in the field of economic governance.