Catch the Eye, and After? The Strategic and Partisan Motivations for the Parliamentary Scrutiny of the ECB

With the deepening of European integration, EU affairs have become increasingly ‘politicized’ (de Wilde, Leupold & Schmidtke 2016). The constant expansion of the EU competences and the successive treaty reforms have profoundly transformed the role and functioning of supranational institutions, resulting notably in a growing ‘parliamentarization’ of the EU (Costa 2019). While the enhanced legislative role of the EP and its influence on the nomination of the European Commission is well documented, the way in which the EP exercises its broad “functions of political control” on EU ‘executive’ institutions (art. 14 TEU) and how such functions contribute to the politicisation of the EU political system remain under-researched. Focusing specifically on questions from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), this paper investigates the day-to-day interactions between the EP and one major EU institution, namely the European Central Bank (ECB). It seeks to establish whether parliamentary questions are an effective tool of accountability in the field of monetary and financial policies and what specific patterns of politicisation emerge through them. Relying on a new dataset, we evidence that MEPs’ questions to the ECB obey to strategic and partisan considerations.