The need for political accountability of EU agencies: the attitude of the European Parliament

EU agencies need to be recognized not only as part of a pluralized EU executive (Hofmann & Morini, 2012) and of the integrated administrative space of the Union (Hofmann & Türk, 2007), but also as political creatures (Everson, Monda & Vos, 2014). This paper will thus focus on the need for political accountability, balancing and circumscribing the autonomy of agencies (Busuioc, Curtin & Groenleer, 2011). While there is already a gap between the de jure autonomy of these actors and how independent they perceive themselves to be (Kleizen & Verhoest, 2020), this research concentrates on the divergence between the formal powers of the European Parliament – as the forum capable of providing such political control (Busuioc, 2013) – and its attitude towards agencies (Lord, 2011), i.e., its willingness to act. Starting from the assumptions that regulation “is far from an apolitical activity” (Hofmann, 2016), that “technical depoliticization is highly illusive” (Everson et al., 2014) and that output legitimacy cannot compensate the lack of input (Maggetti, 2010), this paper will analyze potential drivers of EP’s control activity and assess whether the latter is still “incident-driven” (Busuioc, 2013) based on the study of parliamentary questions and amendments to agencies’ founding regulations.