Responsibility for and Ownership of EU Democracy: Unravelling the Discursive Dynamics of Interparliamentary Relations

National parliaments and the European Parliament (EP) are two sides of the same coin - the EU representative democracy - and have an important role to play in the EU multi-level political system as legitimacy intermediaries. Despite a formidable body of parliamentary literature an important gap exists between the strategic relevance of inter-parliamentary cooperation (IPC) for democratic transformation of the Union and the deficit of research explaining the driving and inhibiting factors behind effective IPC understood as a cross-level and transnational cooperation between national parliaments and the EP aimed at ensuring accountability and legitimacy of EU governance. Moreover, the still unfulfilled potential of IPC is one of the factors behind the surge of Euroscepticism, successes of populist parties and the actual disenchantment of citizens with the ‘European project’. It is assumed that democratic effectiveness of IPC depends not only on its institutional design features, but also, and maybe more crucially, on Members of Parliament’s reciprocal attitudes and expectations towards an acceptable framework for collaboration. Against this background, this paper offers an actor-oriented perspective on the current inter-parliamentary dynamics focusing on the positions of elected representatives in the EU political system, namely Members of the European (MEPs) and national parliaments (MPs) on the meta-democratic, as opposed to sectoral policy-oriented, dimension of IPC. Building on the concepts of ‘multilevel parliamentary field’ (Crum and Fossum, 2009) and ‘multilevel party field’ (Pittoors, 2024), the paper engages in parliamentary discourse analysis addressing the questions about MEPs’ and MPs’ (self)perceptions regarding their institutions’ roles in building the EU’s democratic legitimacy, the desired form of IPC and, consequently, of a suitable EU ‘democratic’ reform. To uncover broader patterns shaping these positions, the paper also asks how institutional embeddedness and party ideology condition the formation of parliamentary discursive stances. It does it through a thematic content analysis of discussions held between 2020-2025 during inter-parliamentary committee meetings of the Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO) as well as Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) which provide a unique sample of transnational parliamentary discourse on various aspects of EU democracy and institutional reform. The discursive analysis places a special focus on the interparliamentary dynamics of interactional power allowing to cast light on the challenges to IPC caused by communicative asymmetries, normative dominance, or institutional pressures.