Capable but Unwilling? The European Commission’s Response Behaviour to Parliamentary Scrutiny

Although parliamentary questioning is essential to ensure the democratic accountability of executives, scholars have paid little attention to their answers to parliamentary questions. Hence, it is still unclear whether parliamentary questions enable legislators to control the executive successfully and efficiently. I argue that executives’ response behaviour to parliamentary questions is determined by their capacity and willingness. While a heavier workload should dampen the quality of all replies equally, executives’ willingness to respond to legislators’ questions should increase if they share partisan, portfolio or constituency ties. These ties incentivise executive members to give preferential treatment to some legislators, causing selective responsiveness to parliamentary questions that severely undermines democratic accountability. I test the theoretical expectations using an original dataset comprising over 125,000 questions from the European Parliament over a 15-year period and the corresponding answers from the European Commission. I use non-linear principal component analysis to construct a latent variable capturing Commissioners’ response behaviour. I then analyse how the characteristics of the question and the questioner relative to the characteristics of the Commissioner (willingness), as well as the characteristics of the responsible Directorate General (capacity), affect the Commission’s responses.