Silent Servants or Mighty Masters? The Role of National Parliamentary Committee Secretariats in EU Affairs

The scholarly debate on parliaments addresses a wide range of issues, but lacks comparative research on parliamentary staffs supporting the members of parliament. The few existing studies are rather descriptive accounts of resources without a strong theoretical perspective or an empirical investigation of their influence on legislative behaviour (except for contributions about the US congressional staff). This paper focuses on the secretariats of parliamentary committees and asks how their organisational configuration, i.e. their size, composition, internal specialisation etc., as well as their key logics of action influence the work and decision-making in parliamentary committees. It applies a new institutionalist organisation theory perspective and argues that the organisational configuration of parliamentary committee secretariats is influenced by internal requirements arising from parliamentary activities (referring to resources) as well as external imperatives by their legislative principals and other actors (referring to legitimacy). In addition, an organisation theory perspective assumes that the logic of action of parliamentary committee secretariats as organisational actors is influenced by institutional context features of the distinct politico-administrative system such as the party composition of governments (and thus the seat distribution in parliament), the formal competencies of parliaments to scrutinise governmental proposals and formulate amendments or own bills as well as the administrative culture in a wider sense underlying the basic tenets of political accountability. Empirically, the paper compares parliamentary committee secretariats of parliamentary committees in the German Bundestag and the Swedish Riksdag, assuming that both chambers differ with regard to the internal and external requirements as well as the institutional context noted above. In addition, a twofold comparison of parliamentary committee secretariats, both between and within parliaments, allows considering alternative explanations such as the relevance of policy sectors and their specific characteristics such as policy salience, seniority, and interdependency with other policy sectors or actor constellations.