Abstract
ABSTRACT Past research has identified a trend towards the bureaucratisation of the parliamentary scrutiny of EU affairs. It highlighted the role of parliamentary staff in selecting relevant issues, advising on subsidiarity and procedures and drafting of opinions and resolutions. However, while administrators clearly play a role, less is known about the Europeanisation of parliamentary administrations. In particular, the impact of the growing Europeanisation of sectoral committees on the Europeanisation of staff is unexplored. This article presents data from a survey of parliamentary administrations in 2021, which shows that the Europeanisation of parliamentary administrations extends beyond the main units in charge of EU affairs and affects sectoral committee staff more generally. At the same time, it reveals that the organisation of staff support for EU affairs varies greatly across the national parliaments depending on the organisation of the political scrutiny, on administrative capacity and on pre-existing units.
Highlights
The literature on parliamentary administrations in EU affairs has shown that staff plays an important support function
It reveals that the organisation of staff support for EU affairs varies greatly across the national parliaments depending on the organisation of the political scrutiny, on administrative capacity and on pre-existing units
As the comparative studies (Högenauer et al, 2016; Högenauer & Christiansen, 2015) show that parliamentary staff is involved to a considerable extent in EU affairs scrutiny in all cases, one can assume that all national parliamentary administrations in the EU are Europeanised to at least some extent: They all employ EU experts and they all deal with EU affairs
Summary
The literature on parliamentary administrations in EU affairs has shown that staff plays an important support function. Neuhold and Högenauer (2016) illustrate the crucial role of the network of permanent representatives of national parliaments in the European Parliament (NPRs) in the day-to-day coordination of scrutiny across national parliaments In parallel to these comparative studies on the. There are many things about the Europeanisation of national parliamentary administrations that we do not understand, in large part because there still is a dearth of relevant data: For example, Högenauer and Christiansen (2015) show that the number of EU experts per parliament varies widely, but there is no ‘good’ explanation in terms of size of the country, EU competences of the parliament or accession date (Högenauer, 2019) This may be in part due to the fact that we do not even fully understand the organisation of EU support. National parliaments employ experts that support their European Affairs Committees (EACs), but we do not know to what extent they employ other EU experts that support sectoral committees or that work in the research service or some other central unit
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