Local Parliamentarians in a Global World

Around the world, members of parliament (MPs) spend considerable time and effort participating in the work of the approximately 160 International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs) existing globally today. In addition to being arenas for deliberation and the developing of ideas, most IPIs’ main objective is to influence the decision- and policymaking of member parliaments’ national governments. The key actors in ensuring these objectives are reached are the MPs appointed by their national parliaments. It is, however, unclear how MPs are meant to reach those goals, and how, if at all, national and sub-national parliaments provide the policies, organizational structures, and processes needed to that end. This paper addresses this research gap by utilizing a multilevel comparative framework that examines how parliaments operate their foreign affairs across the sub-national, national, and supranational levels. While the broader research project encompasses the Icelandic (Althingi) and Danish (Folketinget) parliaments, this paper focuses on the Greenlandic Parliament (Inatsisartut) as a unique and critical case of an autonomous legislature operating within a complex sovereign hierarchy. As a sub-national parliament with the legal right to pursue full independence, Greenland offers an essential site for analyzing how institutional status affects the agency of representatives in international arenas. Relying on original interviews with parliamentarians, the study identifies patterns and causal relationships by comparing the Greenlandic experience with the sovereign national model of Iceland. The analysis examines how factors such as political culture, population size, and institutional design dictate the effectiveness of parliamentary work beyond national borders. By evaluating these elite perceptions, the research contributes to a broader understanding of how parliamentary structures and individual MP behavior are evolving to meet the challenges of an increasingly interconnected and multilevel global political arena.