Responsiveness of EU Institutions to National Parliaments: The Case of the Seasonal Workers Directive

This paper compares the way in which the three main political institutions of the EU – Commission, EP, and Council – have responded to and interacted with national parliaments (NPs) since they gained new powers under the Treaty of Lisbon. As a case study it traces the early legislative progress of legislative proposal, the Seasonal Workers Directive. This is chosen because it was the first proposal after Lisbon that attracted a strong reaction from national parliaments -- 9 reasoned opinions under the subsidiarity Early Warning Mechanism, and 9 contributions under the political dialogue. The empirical task is to compare the extent to which EU institutions were procedurally responsive to NPs’ concerns (explicitly addressing them) and substantively responsive (reflecting such concerns in subsequent internal deliberation). Of the three institutions, the Commission was responsive to NPs both procedurally (responding individually to their concerns) and in a minimally substantive way (addressing their substantive objections, while not yielding to them). The Council, on the other hand, while being unresponsive in procedural terms (hardly responding to NPs’ opinions), was quite receptive to them in substantive terms, to the point that many of their substantive concerns about the legislation were incorporated into later compromise texts (and is likely to be incorporated into the final Council position on the legislation). The EP, by comparison, had little meaningful interaction with NPs, not really responding to their concerns either procedurally or substantively.