Empowered or disempowered? : the role of national parliaments during the reform of European economic governance

This paper investigates how the intergovernmental reform process of European economic governance affected national parliaments' oversight of that policy area. Which parliaments became disempowered and which managed to secure their formal powers – and why? The dependent variable of the study is operationalized as the presence or absence of "emergency legislation" allowing governments to accelerate the legislative process and minimize the risk of a default by constraining national parliaments' powers. This paper examines how national parliaments in all euro-zone states were involved in approving the following measures: the EFSF (establishment and increase of budgetary capacity), the ESM and the Fiscal Compact. The findings demonstrate that whereas northern European parliaments’ powers were secured (or in some cases even fostered), southern European parliaments were disempowered due to the following factors: (i) domestic constitutional set-up permitting emergency legislation, (ii) national supreme or constitutional courts' consent to extensive application of emergency legislation and (iii) international economic and political pressure on governments to prevent default of the legislative process. Due to significant power asymmetries national parliaments remained de jure but not de facto equal in the exercise of their control powers at the EU level. As a consequence, both the disempowerment of particular parliaments and the asymmetry of powers among them had a negative effect on the legitimacy of European economic governance.