Parliaments and the Economic Governance of the European Union: Talking Shops or Deliberative Bodies?
Aleksandra Maatsch
MPIfG Book
Abstract
This book analyses how national parliaments and parliamentary parties performed their legislative, representative and control functions during the reform of European economic governance. Focusing on domestic approvals of anti-crisis measures (EFSF, ESM, and the Fiscal Compact) in all member states of the Eurozone, the book aims at establishing to what extent national parliaments and parliamentary parties secured their competences in EU policy-making during that process.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Aleksandra Maatsch's Parliaments and the Economic Governance of the European Union: Talking Shops or Deliberative Bodies? addresses this question by analyzing (i) in which states were the parliament’s formal powers constrained as a result of anti-crisis measures; (ii) how parliamentary parties voted on the anti-crisis measures; (iii) what were the dominant discourses of the measures’ proponents and opponents; and (iv) which parties advocated neoliberal and which Keynesian measures.
This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in European Union politics and studies, political parties and parliaments, European Economic governance and more broadly to European politics.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 European Financial Crisis: Dominant Narratives and the Legal Status of Anti-Crisis Measures
3 Empowered or Disempowered? The Role of National Parliaments during the Reform of European Economic Governance
4 Drivers of Political Parties' Voting Behaviour in European Economic Governance: The Ultimate Decline of the Economic Cleavage?
5 Parliamentary Parties’ Discourses on Anti-Crisis Measures: Between Solidarity and Particularistic Interest
6 Macroeconomic Preferences of National Parliamentary Parties
7 Conclusions