The literature on the role of national parliaments in the European Union (EU), which has emerged in the early 1990s, has been flourishing ever since and has even gained new momentum with the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty. However, scholars have mainly focused on analyzing the relationship between parliament and government by asking under which conditions the latter is held accountable to the former. In contrast, little is known about the relation between legislatures and citizens in EU affairs. In other words, the literature has mainly explored the control function of domestic legislatures vis-à-vis their governments in EU affairs, whereas the study of their communication function has been largely neglected. It is only just recently that scholars have started to systematically analyze the so-called citizen-related functions of national parliaments in EU politics. Yet, studies of parliamentary engagement with the public tend to focus on the plenary or on EU committees as primary arenas of communication in EU affairs.
This paper takes a different approach and aims at explaining under which conditions MPs in specialized committees as “least likely” arenas of communication effectively engage with their constituencies when they deal with EU affairs. Drawing on principal-agent-theory, we first develop a conceptual framework for assessing what a communication function by parliaments in EU affairs implies and how it differs from the traditional parliamentary communication in domestic politics. The findings show that legislative communication in EU-related areas is by nature much more output-oriented than in domestic politics and therefore requires a more proactive behavior of MPs which cannot to the same extent rely on and react to input and requests from their voters. Drawing on indicators such as the level of transparency, access to and active provision of information, we then proceed by analyzing the scope and nature of public engagement in specialized committees as “least likely” arenas of communication in EU affairs in the EU-27. Preliminary findings point to substantial cross-national variation in the extent to which specialized committees fulfill their communication function (cf. also Auel and Raunio 2011). The comparative study of how specialized committees in the German Bundestag, the Polish Sejm, the French Assemblée Nationale and the Austrian Nationalrat will show that both the status of specialized committees vs. EU committees in the domestic parliamentary setting and individual role models of MPs can account for the varying ability and willingness of specialized committees to “bring the EU to its citizens”.
