Regional Empowerment Under the EWS? Towards a Framework for Analysis

This paper argues that the effects of the Lisbon Treaty provisions for parliamentary empowerment at the regional level should be assessed carefully and their links with political mobilization, institutional re-structuring and policy involvement in a particular context should be analyzed as precisely as possible. While assuming that any institutional change empowers some actors over others, this paper analyzes the effects of the Early Warning System (EWS) for parliamentary modus operandi in EU decentralized systems. It offers a theoretical framework that permits to account for the variations in regional parliamentary mobilization under the EWS and its transformative effect. Drawing from comparative case studies, the paper detects various origins and kinds of institutional transformation in order to offer a broader conceptualization of “parliamentary empowerment” caused by the EWS.