In 2009, the Treaty of Lisbon introduced new scrutiny powers for national parliaments in the form of the Early Warning System (EWS). The EWS allows national parliaments to evaluate the compliance of new European legislative proposals with the principle of subsidiarity and – if a sufficient number of parliament issue complaints – to force the European institutions to review legislative proposals.  The new mechanism has also empowered regional parliaments with legislative powers, as national parliaments are to consult them when evaluating new proposals. These new opportunities have functioned as a wake-up call, as many regional parliaments have used them to reform their EU affairs procedures and have started to issue opinions on EU legislative proposals. However, there is also substantial group of regional parliaments that has not made use if their new powers.

The aim of this panel is to further our understanding of the different levels of activity of different regional parliaments by firstly studying the opportunities of regional parliaments for EU affairs scrutiny at different levels (i.e. control of their own government, control of the European institutions etc.), by secondly constructing explanatory frameworks for variation in Europeanization on the basis of the literatures on territorial politics (e.g. the impact of different forms of intergovernmental relations, constitutional powers, regionalism) and parliamentary scrutiny (e.g. the impact of electoral systems, government-opposition dynamics, euroscepticism) and by thirdly testing these frameworks on cross-national comparative data on regional parliamentary activity.