Regional parliaments and the Early Warning System: An assessment six years after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty (original) (raw)
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The Treaty of Lisbon increased the role of National and Regional Parliaments in the EU decision-making process, in order to compensate for some of the weaknesses of the European institutional architecture. Neither National nor Regional Parliaments are given a real power of veto. However, their active involvement – through the day-to-day activity of direction and scrutiny of their executives and sometimes through the triggering of the “early warning mechanism” – can significantly help in closing the gap between (mainly national) politics and (mainly European) policies and in letting national public opinions have a say in the decisions being taken “in Brussels”. Their active involvement seems even more necessary after the Euro-crisis, which has brought about a steady acceleration of both the trends towards a more inter-governmental EU and the development of an “asymmetric” Europe. Under the light of these trends, in fact, a further increase of the scrutiny function of the European Parliament seems an unrealistic scenario and, in any case, not sufficient in order to oversight and to counterbalance the fragmented (and, thus, very powerful) executive power of the EU.
2013
The Treaty of Lisbon increased the role of National and Regional Parliaments in the EU decision-making process, in order to compensate for some of the weaknesses of the European institutional architecture. Neither National nor Regional Parliaments are given a real power of veto. However, their active involvement -through the day-to-day activity of direction and scrutiny of their executives and sometimes through the triggering of the "early warning mechanism" -can significantly help in closing the gap between (mainly national) politics and (mainly European) policies and in letting national public opinions have a say in the decisions being taken "in Brussels". Their active involvement seems even more necessary after the Euro-crisis, which has brought about a steady acceleration of both the trends towards a more inter-governmental EU and the development of an "asymmetric" Europe. Under the light of these trends, in fact, a further increase of the scrutiny function of the European Parliament seems an unrealistic scenario and, in any case, not sufficient in order to oversight and to counterbalance the fragmented (and, thus, very powerful) executive power of the EU.
The Journal of Legislative Studies (Routledge), 2017
This article analyses the effects of the Lisbon Treaty provisions for regional parliaments in EU decentralised systems by looking at the early warning system (EWS) for subsidiarity control. It argues that the implications of this mechanism for parliamentary empowerment at the regional level should be assessed carefully and their links with political mobilisation, institutional restructuring and policy involvement in a particular context should be analysed as precisely as possible. For this reason, this article proposes a conceptual and analytical framework that allows the detection of several kinds of regional empowerment under the EWS and explains their transformative effects in different national contexts.
Democratizing the European Multi-level Polity? A (re-) Assessment of the Early Warning System _2014
One of the main promises of the Treaty of Lisbon was to increase the democratic legitimacy of the European Union through strengthening the role of national parliaments in EU policy-making under the so-called 'Early Warning System' (EWS) for subsidiarity control. However, introduction of the EWS has met with some criticism in the academic literature. Scholars claim that the mechanism not only fails to alleviate the democratic deficit, but it also obfuscates the existing channels of delegation and accountability in the EU. Moreover, it has been predicted that the EWS will remain a mere 'window dressing', largely unexploited by national assemblies, let alone the subnational parliaments. This article addresses the above-mentioned criticisms four years after the entry into force of the Lisbon provisions. On the basis of an empirically grounded analysis, this article identifies and evaluates positive effects of the EWS with respect to both the input and output legitimacy of the EU. The article posits that the unintended (spill-over) effects of the EWS allow for its broader conceptualisation as (1) a disciplining tool for a better regulatory environment; (2) a representation and accountability enhancing mechanism;
The inclusion of subnational parliaments into the early warning system (EWS) for subsidiarity control generates transforming dynamics in parliamentary modus operandi in European Union (EU) decentralized states. Empirical findings reveal considerable variations in the pace and scope of subnational parliamentary activity in EU policy control challenging the existing theories of territorial mobilization. Drawing from a comparative institutional analysis, this article offers a theoretical framework that permits accounting for cross-country variations in subnational parliamentary mobilization in EU affairs, under the EWS. By placing an increased focus on the domestic environment, it suggests that the two important factors which might affect the scope of parliamentary activity are (1) the relationship between the executive and legislature at the subnational level, and (2) the position of the regional executive in domestic governance arrangements.