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Roles, Heuristics and Patterns of Executive-Legislative Interaction in Europeanized Policy-Making: A comparison of the Swedish, the Hungarian and the German Cases
Project Description Governments and bureaucracies are central actors in the EU policy-making process. There is broad consensus that within the EU multi-level setting, parliamentary scrutiny and co-steering of Europeanized policies face serious difficulties. Accordingly, recent studies have highlighted a general weakening of national parliaments, emphasizing the ‘de-parliamentarization’ of politics in the EU. At the same time, however, there is ample evidence of national and sectoral differences, showing that parliaments have learned to ‘strike back’ over the past years. Regarding this very broad research field, our explorative research project mainly looks into parliamentary-administrative relations. Nationally, bureaucrats are considered as central role partners of MPs. However, we lack knowledge whether or not this statement also holds true in Europeanized policy-making. To fill this void, our research brings together approaches from the study of legislative and bureaucratic behaviour by analyzing role orientations and mutual role perceptions of bureaucrats and politicians, while at the same time relating these approaches to Europeanization studies. We start from the general assumption that role perceptions and role conflicts shape interactions between executive and legislative actors, thereby considerably moulding the decision-making process - how formal and informal rules shaping these interactions are created and dealt with considerably depends on the actor’s role orientations (self-perception) and role expectations (external perception). Roles, in turn, involve general principles and patterns of interpretation, i.e. “heuristics”, providing effective “rules of thumb” in situations characterized by high levels of uncertainty. The project analyses patterns of executive-legislative relations in Germany, Sweden and Hungary. These EU member states feature “working parliaments”, but differ in their administrative traditions. Our study builds on the assumption that role orientations not only vary with administrative traditions but also relate to the degree of Europeanization in a given policy area. Based on document-analysis and face-to-face interviews with MPs and bureaucrats, the project investigates the comparative patterns of interaction, role perceptions, and heuristics. In theoretical terms, our research integrates recent insights from cognition theory and policy analysis into a neo-institutionalist research framework. The empirical research mainly focuses on environmental and economic policy (as examples of strongly Europeanized policy fields) and pension policy (which is still predominantly domestically driven). Publications Journal Articles
Working Papers
Conference Papers
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