Regional Parliaments Questioning EU Affairs

This paper analyzes to what extent parliamentary questions are used for EU affairs scrutiny and for what purpose. In particular, it focuses on whether members of parliament use parliamentary questions to obtain information on policy implementation, or in order to shape new policies, in order to demonstrate interest in constituency concerns or in order to control the government more generally. 

As parliamentary questions are a tool that can be used by individual MPs, the paper assesses Europeanization along different dimensions: the overall activity of the parliament, the activity of the European Affairs Committee and the extent to which MPs beyond the European Affairs Committee use parliamentary questions. It then analyses potential explanatory factors for variation in the use of parliamentary questions, including euroscepticism, the electoral system, government-opposition dynamics and periphery-centre dynamics.