Budgetary coordination and the ‘crown jewels’ of parliamentary participation. Towards contextualised standards for the (supposed) democratic deficit in the EMU.

In the end of the 1990ies, important EU scholars discussed if the EU had a democratic deficit. Today, in the literature on national parliaments in the EU takes such a democratic deficit as granted in the ambit of the EMU’s tighter budgetary coordination. The literature asks about the drivers of parliamentary activity to ‘fight back’ against an ever-increasing deficit of parliamentary participation on national level in European affairs, in particular in budgetary matters which are hailed to be the ‘crown jewels’ of parliamentary rights. The paper presents the results of fieldwork with Members of parliament in budget committees in four parliaments in a crossed pairs comparison (DE, FR, IT, NL): In two parliaments deliberation plays a more important role for members of parliaments in terms of their participation in policy-making in the political system and in two parliaments decision-making and control of the government is more important in the policy-cycle. Parliaments also vary in terms of the dominant macroeconomic paradigms which are traditionally supposed to be the norm for policy-making in their country, more spending oriented budgetary policy making with macroeconomic ideas tending towards demand orientation, or more restrictive budgeting with an orientation at offer oriented macroeconomic policies. The paper finds that MPs across the board do not only have few legitimacy conflicts with increased budgetary coordination on European level but also that the legitimacy conflicts they relate are more dependent on the domestic parliamentary systems and the informal norms of parliamentary participation enshrined in them than on policies for budgetary policy-making stemming from the European Commission or the Council. Low parliamentary activity is mainly the fruit of the perception of low importance. Budgetary policy-making is widely seen as government affair and legitimacy standards for participation in budgetary policy-making context-dependent on the domestic parliamentary practices of exchange with the government. The final part of the paper develops contextualised democracy standards out of the domestic parliamentary system and asks the question if the democratic deficit and the growing depreciation of parliaments which are ‘truisms’ in the literature need reappraisal in the face of more actor-centered approaches to parliamentary participation in budgetary coordination in the EMU. The paper originates from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie D-EMU Democratic elite perceptions in the Economic and Monetary Union (Grant agreement ID: 101107703).