Politicizing Transposition in Times of Crisis?

Parliaments are the losers of European integration (Raunio, 1999; Maurer et al, 2003). However, they are likely to ‘claw back their lost power’ (Holzhacker, 2007, 142). For this reason, numerous researchers have analyzed the way national parliaments seek to control national governmental strategies in EU decision-making. An alternative way of clawing back these lost powers is by influencing the transposition of EU policies. Surprisingly, this second venue for parliamentary proliferation has not received much attention, despite the fact that it is known to offer great potential for EU policy deviation. This gap in the literature is even more striking because of the allegation of increased politicization of EU matters in national political systems (Marks and Hooghe). This politicization is likely to have become even more pronounced as an effect of the current financial-economic crisis, coupled with the advent of populism in various member states. Taken together, these developments beg the question to what extent we can observe a trend of politicized transposition, here defined as more or different parliamentary involvement during transposition, and if so, what causal factors have spurred this development. We will answer this question using a combination of longitudinal comparison and qualitative case studies.  In doing so, we focus on the field of social policy, as this provides a most likely case for politicized transposition: these policies are likely to suffer first during times of economic hardship, they are an attractive venue for populist proliferation, and they are highly politically sensitive.