National Parliaments in the Multilevel Parliamentary Field: What Role for the Early Warning System

The Treaty of Lisbon gave national parliaments the power to adopt ‘reasoned opinions’ on EU legislative proposals in the so-called ‘Early Warning System’. According to the formal procedures, reasoned opinions fulfil a control function: National Parliament can check whether EU legislative proposals are in line with the principle of subsidiarity or whether these laws should be made on the national level. In practice, however, many national parliaments have used this tool rather creatively (cf. the work by Kiiver), for example to make concrete suggestions on how to improve the proposed policy. Some parliaments are thus trying to use reasoned opinions to influence the substance of the policy (rather than to simply judge whether the policy should happen or not), and are thus trying to use reasoned opinions to give them a (weak) legislative function.

The aim of this paper is to analyse how wide-spread the tendency to use reasoned opinions to influence policy content is today and whether it has been growing over time. It aims to understand which parliaments are particularly prone to use reasoned opinions in this way. The expectation is that parliaments that are institutionally strong and well-resourced will be particularly eager to used reasoned opinions as a means to influence the substance of policies.