What Functions Have Interparliamentary Cooperations in Internal and External Differentiation?

Differentiated integration is said to strengthen the national executives and to lead to intransparency. Since concept building on differentiated integration started in the 1970s, the role of supranational institutions, especially the European Parliament, and of national parliaments have been discussed. Embedding differentiated integration into the overall EU system may reduce institutional cleavages or disintegrative tendencies. Currently, there is a debate on a Eurozone parliament to make parliamentary scrutinizing possible. Another option discussed is the strengthening of institutionalized forms of interparliamentary cooperation within differentiated integration. These cooperations known for decades in international organizations and at least since the Maastricht Treaty in European integration are expected to enable parliaments to bridge the levels of executive two-level games, to diminish information asymmetries and therefore strengthen parliamentary scrutiny.

Against this background, the proposed paper analyzes the activities of institutionalized forms of interparliamentary cooperation in internal and external differentiation. Based on an individual code book, all plenary documents of the following six very different forms of interparliamentary cooperation has been coded to find out what parliamentary functions they fulfill, especially what about the scrutiny function: COSAC (no differentiation); Joint parliamentary committee in foreign and security policy, Interparliamentary Conference under Article 13 of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic an Monetary Union (both internal differentiation); European Economic Area Joint Parliamentary Committee, Parliamentary Assembly Union for the Mediterranean, Joint Parliamentary Committee of the African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (all three external differentiation). Interestingly, more scrutiny activities can be found in external differentiation.