Controlling the government is a key task of the parliament of any democratic country,
and has received much scholarly attention. Yet, what we term cross-parliamentary
control, where an MP uses an alternative or international parliamentary arena to
control their national government at home, has received less attention. The Danish
parliament is a well-suited case for an investigation of this phenomenon since it
consists of members elected in the Faroe Islands and Greenland, who –in theory – are
able to carry out this type of control by the use of Folketing options. Through a new
dataset of questions posed by North Atlantic members (2005-2020) (N=869), we
study if cross-parliamentary control exists. Our results show that approximately 8% of
the questions control the government at home. Our findings suggest further studies of
unorthodox legislative control; not only within other metropolitan parliaments but
also in settings of multi-level governance more broadly.
Keywords: Legislative oversight, cross-parliamentary control, muli-level
governance, parliamentary questioning, the Danish Realm.