Controlling at Home from Abroad? Faroese and Greenlandic MPs in the Danish Parliament

Controlling the government is a key task of the parliament of any democratic country, and has received much scholarly attention. Yet, what we term cross-parliamentary control, where an MP uses an alternative or international parliamentary arena to control their national government at home, has received less attention. The Danish parliament is a well-suited case for an investigation of this phenomenon since it consists of members elected in the Faroe Islands and Greenland, who –in theory – are able to carry out this type of control by the use of Folketing options. Through a new dataset of questions posed by North Atlantic members (2005-2020) (N=869), we study if cross-parliamentary control exists. Our results show that approximately 8% of the questions control the government at home. Our findings suggest further studies of unorthodox legislative control; not only within other metropolitan parliaments but also in settings of multi-level governance more broadly. Keywords: Legislative oversight, cross-parliamentary control, muli-level governance, parliamentary questioning, the Danish Realm.