The paper examines, in a comparative perspective, the negotiation autonomy of the executives of the three European federal countries (Austria, Belgium and Germany) in the Council of the European Union vis-à-vis the their national and subnational parliaments. When most studies adopt a bottom-up approach focusing on the control mechanisms by the (sub)national parliaments, this paper concentrates on the actions and on the negotiation behaviour of the executive (the Austrian, Belgian and German representatives as agents) vis-à-vis the (sub)national parliaments (as principals).
On the one hand, the paper addresses the question how the Austrian, Belgian and German ‘agent’ deal with the (sub)national parliamentary constraints in the negotiations taking place in the Environment Council. Hence, the paper questions the impact of the scrutiny of domestic parliaments on the representatives negotiating in the Environment Council. It therefore examines the impact, on the agent behaviour, of the degree to which the domestic parliaments activate the scrutiny mechanisms at their disposal. On the other hand, it also tackles the question on how the national and subnational parliaments interact (i.e parliamentary cooperation in the Member States) and what consequences does it have on parliamentary control and on the executive autonomy. Therefore, this research aims at offering a comparative and multi-level understanding of the European decision-making processes by analyzing the interactions between the European, national and regional levels.
The paper presents new empirical data on four legislative decision-making processes in the environmental policy sector (period 2009-2014), collected through semi-structured interviews with representatives in the Council, parliamentarians and administrators from January 2015 until March 2016.The analysis also relies on a review of the literature and an analysis of official documents.
