Formats of Parliamentary Debate About the European Union

Abstract

The empirical study presented in this book investigates parliamentary debates about European integration in four national parliaments: the French Assemblee Nationale, the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, and the Austrian Nationalrat. This selection of cases includes a considerable degree of variation in the institutional and party political context of parliamentary interactions, resulting in different styles of debate. The task of this chapter is to provide a comparative overview of the different formats of parliamentary debate—understood as an expression for the relative strength and the presence of speakers from the government majority and parliamentary opposition, and the degree of contentiousness of their interaction. By characterizing these context conditions, this chapter establishes the background for the more detailed reviews of five thematic debates that were selected as case studies (to be presented in the next chapter). Its aim is to show that considerable differences can be observed particularly between the relatively closed, top-down communication in the French National Assembly, and the more open, relatively balanced, and polarized exchange between parliamentary speakers in the British House of Commons. As intermediary cases representing a combination of government-led communication and dialogue between parliamentary groups, the German Bundestag and Austrian Nationalrat furthermore demonstrate the importance of party political factors for the influence of both the parliamentary opposition on the thematic agenda and the style of interaction within the debate in the plenary. The chapter starts with a comparative systematization of the four national cases (Sect. 4.1). Two subsequent sections provide an overview of the communicative activity of the four parliaments (Sect. 4.2) and describe the case-specific styles and formats of debate (Sect. 4.3) summarized in the conclusion (Sect. 4.4).