Projectdetails

This project shall explore how national parliaments, the traditional forums for enforcing democratic accountability of government actors, use alternative accountability mechanisms to match the challenges of the erosion of parliamentary accountability in the European Union. For this purpose, the project shall comprise an analysis of the use of the Early Warning System for the principle of subsidiarity. Envisaged under both the EU Constitutional Treaty and the Treaty of Lisbon, it is being implemented in practice since 2006 as national parliaments enter into a dialogue with the European Commission over the justification of its legislative proposals. Usually, alternative accountability mechanisms - involving accountabililty to e.g. ombudsmen, judges or auditors - are conceptualized to take place outside traditional parliamentary processes. The study is premised on the idea, however, that parliaments can actually themselves employ innovative accountability mechanisms, and that the Early Warning System represents a framework for such a mechanism. In that context, national parliaments can become active via (1) non-traditional parliamentary actorship, such as the formation of accountability networks with other parliaments; (2) non-traditional parliamentary accountability enforcement, by using professionalized assessment criteria to pass judgment on government conduct; and (3) non-traditional parliamentary sanctioning, such as naming-and-shaming instead of traditional no-confidence votes. The study will provide an important contribution to the debate on how parliamentary accountability deficits in the EU may be remedied via new, non-traditional means. Its innovative strength lies not only in its being the first systematic analysis of subsidiarity control by national parliaments; it also lies in the critical reflection to what extent non-traditional accountability process can take place inside traditional forums, namely parliaments; and, if they can, to what extent 'alternative' accountability mechanisms are truly alternative.