Abstract
AbstractAs in nearly all European Union (EU) policy areas, scholars have turned to analysing the role of national parliaments, in addition to that of the European Parliament (EP), in trade politics. Yet, there is limited understanding of how the parliamentarians at the two levels interact. This article fills the gap by conceptualizing these interactions as a continuum ranging between cooperation, coexistence and competition. We use this continuum to explore multilevel party interactions in EU trade talks and show how cooperation compels politicization – national parliamentarians mainly interact with their European colleagues in salient matters. However, we argue that the impact of politicization on multilevel relations between parliamentarians in the EP and national parliaments is conditioned by party-level factors. Hence, we account for how and why politicization triggers multilevel party cooperation across parliaments in the EU through ideological orientation, government position and policy preferences and show how this takes place in the case of trade.
Highlights
As in most European Union (EU) policy areas, scholars have turned to analysing the role of national parliaments, in addition to that of the European Parliament (EP), in trade politics
Before we turn to an empirical investigation of multilevel party cooperation, we provide a brief backdrop of the state of play of EP–national parliaments (NPs) interaction on a parliamentary level in EU trade affairs
We aimed to explore multilevel party interactions across the EP and NPs and how these relations played out in EU trade policy
Summary
As in most European Union (EU) policy areas, scholars have turned to analysing the role of national parliaments, in addition to that of the European Parliament (EP), in trade politics. This article fills the gap by conceptualizing these interactions as a continuum ranging between cooperation, coexistence and competition We use this continuum to explore multilevel party interactions in EU trade talks and show how cooperation compels politicization – national parliamentarians mainly interact with their European colleagues in salient matters. European citizens are directly represented through the European Parliament (EP), and indirectly through their national governments, which are accountable to national parliaments (NPs) (Article 10, Treaty on European Union) How to translate these principles into respective power and roles, has proven contentious, and empirical knowledge on how these representative bodies relate to each other in EU politics is scant (Herranz-Surrallés 2014; Miklin 2013; Winzen et al 2015). The negotiations of several of the EU’s trade agreements have become contested in domestic public opinion, especially the negotiations on the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada and the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the USA
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