When Europe Hits Parliament: Explaining Variation in the Communicative Responses of Four EU Member State Legislatures to European Integration

Existing research about the Europeanization of national parliaments has paid relatively little attention to their communicative role in the context of EU governance, in spite of an increase of contentious plenary debates dealing with issues such as EU Treaty Reform or the European Debt Crisis. In this context, an interesting puzzle is to explain the variation in the frequency and form of debates about the EU that can be observed in a comparison of cases. Addressing this question, the paper theorises the incentives and constraints of parliamentary actors to seek debate about the EU, and the political opportunity structure established by the institutional rules and party political constellation of national parliaments mediating these actor-related motives. 

In the empirical part, this framework is applied to investigate and explain the variation in the debating function of four EU Member State parliaments that differ considerably with regard to institutional and party political context factors (the Austrian Nationalrat, the British House of Commons, the French Assemblée Nationale, and the German Bundestag). Evaluating records of parliamentary procedure, interviews with MPs and quantitative  data from a content analysis of plenary debates between 2005 and 2012, the paper demonstrates both the increasingly intensive communication of parliaments about the EU and the variation in the types and styles of debate that can be observed,  ranging from top-down communication by the executive (Assemblée Nationale) and antagonistic debate between government and opposition (Nationalrat, House of Commons) to a mostly cooperative style of debate between the executive and parliamentary parties (Bundestag).