Why are similar choices made in seemingly different environments? This happened when the new EU member states of 2004 adapted their parliaments to EU membership. National parliaments set up oversight scrutiny instruments in order to follow and control the EU policy-making processes when they integrate into the EU. There is considerable variation in the institutional set-ups and competencies embedded in the parliamentary European Affairs Committees (EAC) in the present member states. However, an interesting pattern has emerged over time: The likelihood that the parliamentary committees have been invested with the power to issue binding recommendations to their governments is greater the later a state has joined the EU (Hamerly 2007, Jungar 2010). Th paper sets out to describe how a policy entrepreneur, the Danish parliament, engaged in influencing the new member states parliaments in setting up strong parliamentary EU scrutiny organisations and in particular mandate-based parliamentary control. The setting up of parliamentary control instruments consequently took place in a trans-national environment consisting of various multilateral as well as bilateral arenas offering many opportunities for policy transfer, lesson drawing and learning (Jacobson 2010, Jungar 2010). This article aims at describing particularly one aspect of these trans-national processes, namely, the activities of a parliamentary policy entrepreneur, who actively engages in information dissemination and persuasion. It cannot be fully established that a causal link prevails between the institutional choices made by the national parliaments and the policy entrepreneurial activities, but the study accounts for the transnational activities, which impacted on the processes, debates and eventually the preference formation within the national parliaments, both among the elected representatives as well as the civil servants. Rather than assuming that the national parliaments had fixed preferences or ideas on what kind of EU parliamentary scrutiny mechanisms they wanted, these were formed and transformed in meditative processes where experiences were shared, good performing examples identified, comparisons made and expectations aired.
