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Since the Lisbon Treaty National Parliaments (NPs) can play a formal role in the Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP). One of the complexities of this legislative process is that the formal decisions are pre-negotiated in informal trilogues between the Council, the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission. NPs have no role to play in trilogues, and have difficulties accessing information discussed in trilogue meetings, hindering MPs to hold their national government to account for decisions made in the Council. This article explores whether NPs monitor trilogue negotiations, and, if so, how and why do they do this. The empirical material is collected through semi-structured interviews with actors from several NPs and a content analysis of debates in two Member States. The results show that NPs operate in a formal and informal institutional context, both at the EU and national level. These institutional arrangements are used by MPs to lower costs of collecting information on trilogue negotiations in order to be able to hold the government to account and to steer the negotiation position of the government in the direction of their own policy positions. However, the increased attention for trilogue negotiations by NPs cannot alleviate the phenomenon of domestic de-parliamentarization.

The Lisbon Treaty gave the European Parliament extensive new powers and its consent is now required for the vast majority of EU international agreements. At the same time, national parliaments—and even regional ones—are increasingly asserting their powers over areas of European governance that were traditionally dominated by the executive. Exerting influence and conducting oversight is time-consuming, however. Particularly at the EU-level parliaments cannot influence or scrutinise every policy dossier with equal rigour. A key factor directing parliamentary attention seems to be the ‘politicisation’ of an issue. In other words, the amount of contestation and attention given to a particular issue seems to affect parliamentary activity. This thematic issue seeks to assess how politicisation affects the role parliaments play within the system of EU governance. In particular, the contributions aim to answer the over-arching question of whether politicisation has an impact on how parliaments seek to influence policy-making and hold the EU executives to account. Furthermore, we raise the question of whether and how politicisation affects the role of parliaments as arenas for contestation and communication of different political interests. Jointly, the findings provide the empirical foundations for a more comprehensive debate regarding the democratic implications of politicisation. Politicisation puts pressure on parliaments to act, but parliamentarians themselves may also find it in their interest to instigate contestation. This thematic issue addresses these questions by shedding light on both the European Parliament and national parliaments and examines different policy-fields reaching from climate change and trade, to financial affairs and the Common Fisheries Policy.

Much of the discussion about the provisions on national parliaments in the Lisbon Treaty has concerned the potential for increasing politicization and parliamentarization of European Union (EU) politics. However, a more immediate change can be expected at the domestic level, as national parliaments adapt to make effective use of these new powers. In order to approach this question systematically, this article develops a framework for the analysis of the Europeanization of national parliaments that starts from the recognition that the Lisbon changes involve an inherent dynamic towards increasing transnational interaction among parliaments as well as pressures to rely more on technical expertise and administrative support in their internal workings. The processes of transnationalization and bureaucratization are considered as key indicators that help us to identify different degrees of Europeanization of national parliaments in the EU. As a final step, the article develops a typology of national parliaments based on the assumption that the more Europeanized parliaments will tend to invest more into their administrative resources and will engage to a greater extent with other national parliaments as well as with EU-level actors. The conceptual framework developed here is designed to facilitate systematic empirical research into the Europeanization of national parliaments.

The Palgrave Handbook of National Parliaments and the European Union offers a comprehensive picture of the European activities of national parliaments in all the 28 member states of the EU. In the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty, it questions whether national legislatures do matter in European governance. With contributions from both academics and practitioners, this volume integrates the latest constitutional and legal developments as well as the consequences of the economic crisis in every country in the EU. Special emphasis is also placed on the actual parliamentary practices relating to European affairs. In addition, the volume includes some cross-sectional entries on key issues such as parliamentary administration and inter-parliamentary cooperation. By covering a large number of aspects and cases, this collection provides a unique source for assessing the degree of actual parliamentary and democratic control of the European governance at the domestic level.

The European Parliament (EP) is branded as one of the winners of the Lisbon Treaty. It has seen its role expanded to more than 40 Treaty articles and obtained the status of co-legislator in previously uncharted territory such as agriculture, fisheries and legal migration. This raises the question of how the EP adapts itself to the newly obtained powers in order to fulfill its legislative role. A very pertinent issue in this context are the type of tasks that are delegated to EP civil servants as this might have implications for the democratic legitimacy of the directly elected Members. This contribution identifies the conditions under which civil servants take up different types of tasks by looking at four cases in two different policy areas: migration and fisheries. Political importance of the dossier and expertise are identified as key determinants for the role of civil servants in the ordinary legislative procedure.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the role of parliamentary administrations in the control of European Union policy-making. It questions whether the decision to give parliaments greater powers in the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty had only the intended effect of political debate on European policies, or whether it has also resulted in the bureaucratisation of parliaments. The authors argue that the challenges of information-management faced by parliaments lead them to delegate an extensive set of tasks to their administrations. They offer a broad empirical picture, analysing the challenges faced by national parliaments and the role and response of their administrations in the case of the European Parliament, national parliaments and regional parliaments. In addition, the book studies the interaction between different administrations and their contribution to interparliamentary cooperation. It presents a new and different perspective on the challenges and dynamics of multi-level parliamentarism. -- Introduction -- Conceptualizing the Role of Parliamentary Administrators -- Administrative Players in the European Parliament -- Transnational Bureaucratic Networks in the EU: The Role of Parliamentary Officials in Inter-Parliamentary Coordination and Control -- The Administrations of National Parliaments and the Scrutiny of EU Affairs -- The Europeanization of National Parliamentary Administrations: Convergence or Divergence? -- New Tasks, Limited Resources: Regional Parliamentary Administrations in EU Affairs -- Conclusion

A combination of revisions of European Treaties and national constitutional reforms have — as a general rule — led to a strengthening of parliaments in the EU since the Single European Act (Hrbek 2010). However, initially, treaty reforms primarily benefited the EP, whereas national reforms and more recent treaty reforms have also considered the role of national parliaments. European integration has thus been a particularly great challenge for regional parliaments. Regions are less well-represented in EU policy-making than member states. In addition, the dominant actors in regional interest representation, both in intrastate coordination and in Brussels, are regional governments. As a result, until the Treaty of Lisbon, the role of regional parliaments in EU policymaking was mainly limited to controlling their regional executives, which were themselves often playing a subordinated role in the EU policy processes.

The Lisbon Treaty has substantially extended the co-legislative rights of the European Parliament (EP). This raises the general question of how the EP organizes itself internally in order to be able to maximize its input into the legislative process. In the quest of information processing, it is likely that officials inside the EP gain in importance. The article thus aims to clarify the conditions under which these EP officials impact on the EU policy process and as such can influence policy outcomes. The analysis is based on case studies from five different policy domains. The observations reflect that under certain conditions EP officials play a steering role in the EU decision-making process. As such they can have a significant impact on the policymaking process, defying the dualistic Weberian approach according to which politicians take decisions and officials merely implement.

In the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, much of the academic debate on national parliaments in the EU has focused on the new powers of national parliaments and the potential for the politicisation and parliamentarisation of the EU. In the process, the role of administrators in the parliamentary control of EU affairs has been neglected. This article addresses that gap by comparing parliamentary administrations to a set of ideal types on the basis of in-depth interviews and a comparative survey of parliamentary staff. This leads to the observation that the roles of parliamentary administrators have been further expanded after Lisbon to a range of tasks that go beyond technical support and include elements of agenda-setting.

This article examines the role of the standing committees in building consensus within the European Parliament (EP) and asks whether the ability to fulfil this function has remained stable even in the context of enlarged membership after the June 2004 elections. To this avail, original data have been collected on the voting behaviour in EP committees, from July 1999 through July 2006, and interviews with key players have been conducted. Findings show that committees generally work very consensually, regardless of the issue at stake and the procedure applied. At the same time, the committee system seems to be evolving towards greater differentiation across policy areas and, partially, across legislative procedures.

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Romania joined the European Union (EU) on 1 January 2007, but economic relations were established long before this date. In 1967, Romania was the first Central Eastern European country to establish official relations with the European Economic Community (EEC) when it signed a series of agreements on the export of food products. These agreements exempted Romania from certain taxes, while obliging it to maintain a minimum price for the products it exported to the EEC. However, the orientation of the communist regime and its frequent violations of fundamental human rights meant that diplomatic relations between Romania and the EU began only after the end of the Cold War, in particular on 1 February 1993 when an EU Association Agreement was signed. © Claudia Hefftler, Christine Neuhold, Olivier Rozenberg and Julie Smith 2015, Respective authors 2015 and Wolfgang Wessels 2015.

France has an ambivalent relationship with the European Union (EU). While some of the most ardent supporters of the Community method (such as Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors) were French, French politicians, in particular former President Charles de Gaulle, have been among those who have opposed this model strongly (Dehousse, 2012, p. 155).

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