Katrin Auel

Regarding further enlargement of the European Union (EU), Austria’s political priorities are beyond doubt. Ever since joining the EU in 1995, different waves of enlargement have been high on the country’s agenda and this is especially true for the accession of countries in the Western Balkans. Regardless of the respective government’s coalition com...

In the last two years, the topic of science and democracy skepticism has become a focus of political and media debate, especially because of the experiences during the COVID- 19-pandemic and the media reception of the Eurobarometer survey 516 from 2021. Topics addressed in this debate included, for example, questioning the democratic legitimacy of...

Austria still has a long way to go in its efforts to achieve both the European climate targets and the even more ambitious self-set objective of climate neutrality by 2040. According to the Austrian Court of Audit, greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 24% on average in the EU over the last 30 years (from 1990 to 2017), while they increased by 5% i...

The yearbook on European integration, compiled by the Institute of European Politics in Berlin, has documented the process of European integration in an up-to-date and detailed way since 1980. The result is a unique record of contemporary European history over a 43 year period. The 2023 edition of the yearbook continues this tradition. In approxima...

With the COVID-19 crisis of 2020, questions of European solidarity are once more focussing public attention in Austria. This topic is certainly not new within the country’s political debate. Viewed from a rather national perspective and with emotions sometimes running high, EU solidarity has always been a widely discussed issue even before Austria...

The yearbook on European integration, compiled by the Institute of European Politics in Berlin, has documented the process of European integration in an up-to-date and detailed way since 1980. The result is a unique record of contemporary European history over a 42 year period. The 2022 edition of the yearbook continues this tradition. In approxima...

This paper investigates the salience of and the position on Differentiated integration (DI) for the Austrian government. The analysis is based on both an analysis of government programmes, programmatic government speeches and parliamentary debates between 2004 and 2019/20. It shows that DI is overall not a salient issue in Austria, at least with re...

The last decades have witnessed a remarkable relocation of politics, resulting in complex systems of multilevel governance. This development poses challenges for parties and parliaments, the central collective actors in representative democracy. The chapter discusses these challenges as well as actors’ responses. It focuses especially on the adapta...

The yearbook on European integration, compiled by the Institute of European Politics in Berlin, has documented the process of European integration in an up-to-date and detailed way since 1980. The result is a unique record of contemporary European history over a 41 year period. The 2021 edition of the yearbook continues this tradition. In approxima...

Advisory ex ante referendums, such as the referendum on the UK membership in the European Union in 2016, provide MPs with a (more or less) clear mandate from their principal, but they are not legally binding. Implementation thus still requires a legislative act, usually by parliament. MPs therefore face the decision whether to follow the will of ‘t...

Die Rolle nationaler Parlamente in der EU-Politik hat mit dem Vertrag von Lissabon eine entscheidende institutionelle Aufwertung erfahren. Seither wird die bisher auf die Kontrolle und Mitbestimmung in europapolitischen Angelegenheiten innerhalb der Mitgliedstaaten beschränkte parlamentarische Beteiligung unter anderem durch das neue Frühwarnsystem...

The yearbook on European integration, compiled by the Institute of European Politics in Berlin, has documented the process of European integration in an up-to-date and detailed way since 1980. The result is a unique record of contemporary European history over a 40 year period. The 2020 edition of the yearbook continues this tradition. In approxima...

In the spotlight for some time now, the potential of national parliaments to legitimise EU politics has become even more salient given the growing politicisation and public contestation of EU issues. Their ability to realise this potential depends, however, vitally on citizens being actually aware of parliamentary involvement in EU affairs. Academi...

How do legislators deal with having preferences that go against those of the principals that they represent in parliament? This article analyzes the debate in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in the House of Commons to explore the relationship between divergent preferences and legislative speeches. It finds that legislators who defy the will...

The Lisbon Treaty strengthened in the EU multilevel system in several ways, for example through the Early Warning System (EWS) and a stronger focus on inter-parliamentary cooperation. These provisions, Auel argues, provide national parliaments with the opportunity to move on from the role of strategic ‘external veto players’ (Benz in West Eur Polit...

European policy exerts a considerable influence on shaping politics in Austria. Vice versa, Austrian policy forms a constitutive element of what is negotiated and decided in Brussels. This book addresses the question of how and under which externally and internally induced framework conditions Austrian ideas, strategies and interests are conceived,...

The yearbook on European integration, compiled by the Institute of European Politics in Berlin, has documented the process of European integration in an up-to-date and detailed way since 1980. The result is a unique record of contemporary European history over a 39 year period. The 2019 edition of the yearbook continues this tradition. In approxima...

Everyone agrees that members of parliaments (MPs) should keep in touch with the people they represent. Yet some MPs invest more in communication with their constituency than others. We approach this problem with data from the parliamentary communication allowance in the United Kingdom, where all MPs had the same amount of budget to reach out proact...

The role of national parliaments in EU matters has become an important subject in the debate over the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. Yet despite a remarkable increase in parliamentary involvement in EU affairs, the added value in terms of democratic legitimacy will remain limited if citizens are not aware of their activities. Given th...

Over the last years, the role of national parliaments (NPs) in the European Union (EU) has been upgraded in several ways, most importantly through the Early Warning System (EWS) and a new role in Treaty revisions established by the Treaty of Lisbon (ToL). These provisions formally turn national legislatures into EU actors in their own right that ca...

Over the last 20 years, the role of national parliaments in European Union (EU) affairs has gained considerable academic attention. Much of the literature has focused on the parliamentary control function and shown that national parliaments are no longer docile lambs willing to be led to the European slaughtering block, but exercise tighter scrutin...

Over the last twenty years, the role of national parliaments in EU affairs has gained considerable academic attention. Much of the literature, however, has focused on parliamentary scrutiny and control in EU affairs. What tends to be generally overlooked is that the parliamentary communication function is at least as important in EU politics as the...

National parliaments have the potential to serve as transmission belts between the European Union (EU) and their citizens. By publicly communicating EU issues, they can enhance the visibility, public accountability and ultimately the legitimacy of supranational governance. Not least since the Eurozone crisis, this task has become increasingly impor...

Within the EU, the opacity of policy-making processes and the resulting lack of accountability of decision-makers have been defined as core problems of democratic legitimacy in both academic and political debates. Here, it has been argued that national parliaments are in a unique position to contribute to making EU politics more democratic by commu...

National parliaments have the potential to serve as transmission belts between the European Union (EU) and their citizens. By publicly communicating EU issues, they can enhance the visibility, public accountability and ultimately the legitimacy of supranational governance. Not least since the eurozone crisis, this task has become increasingly impor...

National parliaments have the potential to serve as transmission belts between the European Union (EU) and their citizens. By publicly communicating EU issues, they can enhance the visibility, public accountability and ultimately the legitimacy of supranational governance. Not least since the eurozone crisis, this task has become increasingly impor...

There is an on-going debate in the literature as to whether national parliaments can and do play an active role in EU policy-making. The main reason for persistent disagreement is the lack of comparative empirical data on parliamentary behaviour in EU affairs. The article aims to contribute to this debate by presenting the first comparative quantit...

The eurozone crisis suggests a significant reinforcement of executive dominance in EU policy-making. Opaque emergency decisions taken at European summits as well as treaties established outside of the EU legal framework facilitate the side-lining of democratically elected chambers. This development entails the risk of a new wave of de-parliamentari...

The role of national parliaments in EU matters has become an important subject in the debate over the democratic legitimacy of European Union decision-making. Strengthening parliamentary scrutiny and participation rights at both the domestic and the European level is often seen as an effective measure to address the perceived ‘democratic deficit’ o...

This item has no abstract

In recent decades, national parliaments - Formerly the ‘poor losers’ of European integration - have learned ‘to fight back’ and obtained greater participation rights in domestic European policymaking.¹ Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, national parliaments even have an explicit role in the European Union’s (EU) legislative process, i...

The eurozone crisis challenges the scrutiny systems of national parliaments: many instruments tackling the crisis were established outside the EU legal framework; the crisis management has generally been dominated by European and national executives; and decisions were taken under enormous time pressure. Did national parliaments become involved in...

Since the late 1970s, but especially since Unification in 1990, the German federal system has come under considerable stress. On the one hand, party competition is increasingly played out through the Bundesrat, the body representing the Länder governments at the federal level, making intergovernmental coordination more difficult and leading to accu...

National parliaments have often been described as latecomers to European integration, but there is little doubt that they have developed the institutional means to become more involved over the last few years – and especially since the Lisbon Treaty. Accordingly, the main focus of the literature has been on this institutional adaptation and thus on...

Over the last 20 years, the role of national parliaments in European Union (EU) affairs has gained considerable academic attention. Much of the literature has focused on the parliamentary control function and shown that national parliaments are no longer docile lambs willing to be led to the European slaughtering block, but exercise tighter scrutin...

Trotz der stetig wachsenden Bedeutung „Europas“ für die Politik der Mitgliedstaaten entdeckte die Politikwissenschaft das Thema der Europäisierung erst relativ spät. Lange Zeit haben sich Wissenschaftler vor allem mit dem Prozess der europäischen Integration selbst beschäftigt. Sie sind der Frage nachgegangen, warum souveräne Staaten sich immer eng...

Two features of German federalism have been the subject of much criticism in recent years, the veto power of the Bundesrat and the centralization of legislative competences. The former is made responsible for the (in)famous German ‘Reformstau’, the latter for severely limiting autonomous policy making at the Länder level. The paper argues that both...

One of the central projects on the Grand Coalition's agenda 2005 was a reform of the German federal system. And while an earlier Reform Commission had failed, the Grand Coalition was indeed more successful: the first stage of the reform came into force in September 2006. Does that mean Germany will finally escape the 'joint decision trap' and the w...

The question of strengths and weaknesses of national parliaments in EU affairs, one of the most salient in the debate on the democratic legitimacy of the EU, is generally answered by assessing formal parliamentary powers which can influence their governments' EU policy. Such an evaluation, however, is flawed: Formal mandating rights are usually inc...

At first glance, the Europeanisation of the German Bundestag seems quite straightforward: in reaction to the process of European integration the Bundestag acquired a set of comparatively strong participation and scrutiny rights in EU politics. It therefore seems rather astonishing that German members of parliament make only very little use of these...

Ohne Zusammenfassung

The intensified debate on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union, which started with the ratification debacle of the Maastricht Treaty and has since become ever more prominent, has pushed national parliaments to the centre-stage of public as well as academic interest. At the same time we are witnessing a fast growing interest in the questi...

Parliamentary systems can be characterised by particular patterns of interaction between the executive, the majority parties and the opposition parties in parliament. The basic argument outlined in this paper is that in order to understand the impact of European integration on national parliamentary democracies we have to find out how these pattern...

Thesis (doctoral) FernUniversität, Hagen, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-339).

Die immer umfassenderen Politikgestaltungskompetenzen der Europäischen Union sind für das institutionelle Gefüge der Mitgliedstaaten nicht folgenlos. Vielmehr führen sie in den Mitgliedstaaten zu Veränderungen existierender politischer Strukturen und Prozesse. Ein wichtiges Ergebnis europäischer Integration stellt deshalb nicht nur die schrittweise...