The ability of national parliaments to oversee major developments in European integration has undergone changes in the last decade. Institutional developments, specifically the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty have enhanced the role of national parliaments in European integration. Political developments such as the Eurozone crisis constitute a challenge to recently established scrutiny practices. The executive dominance of the European Council (EC), the rise of the informal Eurogroup and the intergovernmental modes of decision making in general, made it more difficult for parliaments to keep track of affairs. This paper suggests a new approach to analyze the level of scrutiny of EU affairs provided by national parliaments. We develop a fine-grained measurement of how parliaments responded to the Eurozone crisis, by means of an in-depth comparative analysis of the debates in the Dutch Lower House about the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and about the Banking Union. We use a mixed method design to determine whether parliament(arian)s succeeded in giving the government a hard time - by being informed on the topic, asking valid questions, knowing the state of play in Brussels, or by committing and confronting the government on their negotiation behavior. We uncover variation in the level of scrutiny that so far was neglected by the literature. Our analyses furthermore reveal a punctuated pattern of the level of scrutiny that is related to media attention, the varying sensitivity of different parts of the dossier and the proximity to relevant meetings in Brussels.
