Original Article
The opposition deficit in EU accountability: Evidence from over 20 years of plenary debate in four member states
CHRISTIAN RAUH,
PIETER DE WILDE,
Corresponding Author
CHRISTIAN RAUH
WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany
Address for correspondence: Christian Rauh, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, D-10785 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorCHRISTIAN RAUH,
PIETER DE WILDE,
Corresponding Author
CHRISTIAN RAUH
WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany
Address for correspondence: Christian Rauh, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, D-10785 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Debates about the European Union's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has to be linked to decision-making moments and should feature a balance between government and opposition. The recent literature discusses various partisan incentives that support or undermine these criteria, but analyses integrating these arguments are rare. This article provides a novel comparative perspective by studying the patterns of public EU emphasis in more than 2.5 million plenary speeches from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados over a prolonged period from 1991 to 2015. It documents that parliamentary actors are by and large responsive to EU authority and its exercise where especially intergovernmental moments of decision making spark plenary EU salience. But the salience of EU issues is mainly driven by government parties, decreases in election time and is negatively related to public Euroscepticism. The article concludes that national parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability and suffer from an opposition deficit in particular.
Supporting Information
| Filename | Description |
|---|---|
| ejpr12222-sup-0001-SuppMat.pdf490.6 KB | Appendix A: Web-scraping and splitting parliamentary speech data Appendix B: Dictionaries of EU term-level references Appendix C: Distribution and transformation of the dependent variable Appendix D: Dataset description Appendix E: Regression diagnostics and robustness checks Appendix F: Controlling for EU positions voiced in party manifestos Appendix G: Substantive effects |
Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.
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