Over the last years, the role of national parliaments in the European decision-making process has become one of the most salient issues for the debate on the legitimacy of the national and the European constitutional set-up. Numerous theoretical and empirical studies assessed the impact of the European integration on parliamentary institutions and their adaptation, explained national variations of parliamentary capacity to control their executives and, more recently, explained national parliaments’ activity in EU affairs. Most of these studies approach EU affairs as a homogenous policy area and rarely look at individual policy sectors. Many national parliaments, however, have embarked on a process of 'mainstreaming', marked by the expansion of the scrutiny process beyond European Affairs Committees and the integration of EU affairs into the 'normal' parliamentary processes, for example within the specialised standing committees. In addition, the economic crisis, for example, may have increased the incentives for parliamentarians to scrutinize issues related to EMU and economic governance, while the rise of extreme right wing parties possibly generated a greater parliamentary attention to issues of immigration and border control.

The panel therefore aims at disentangling ‘EU affairs’ and at analysing the way national parliaments deal with specific European policy fields in a comparative perspective. In this line, the panel brings together contributions focusing on parliamentary participation in different European policy areas from a broader perspective, which includes different forms of parliamentary behaviour such as traditional legislative scrutiny, inter-parliamentary cooperation and networking within policy areas as well as subsidiarity control.