Registration is now open for `Europeanisation of Parliamentary Behaviour`
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Conference convened by Dr Katrin Auel (Lecturer and Fellow in Politics, University of Oxford and Mansfield College, Oxford) and Dr Olivier Rozenberg (Fellow in Politics, Sciences Po, Center for European Studies, Paris)
21-22 July 2009, Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University.
Since the early 1990s, the role of national parliaments in the European Union (EU) has been one of the most important issues in the debate on the democratic legitimacy of EU politics. Yet despite the great interest in and the now broad empirical literature on the subject, the discussion is ongoing whether national parliaments are the main victims of the integration process or whether they actually play an effective role in European policy-making. One of the main reasons for the disagreement is that we still know very little about actual parliamentary behaviour in EU affairs. So far, the literature has focused almost exclusively on the institutional adaptation of national parliaments to the process of European integration and, in particular, on formal parliamentary rights of influence, i.e. the degree to which parliament can bind the government to a specific negotiation position in the Council of the EU. The result is an incomplete account of parliamentary involvement in EU affairs: On the one hand, formal capabilities do not necessarily equal actual parliamentary behaviour. One the other hand, this perspective tends to ignore other important parliamentary functions such as public debate and holding the government to account. Our understanding of the role of national parliaments in the EU will therefore greatly benefit from the study of parliamentary behaviour because it will enable us to gain a more comprehensive picture of parliamentary involvement in EU politics. The workshop will bring together leading experts on the issue of national parliaments in the EU to discuss this new research agenda and present research addressing both new empirical questions and theoretical challenges.
The participants to the conference will be:
Dr Catriona Carter (University of Edinburgh), Dr Enikő Győri (Hungarian Parliament and University of Budapest), Dr Hans Hegeland (Swedish Parliament), Dr Ron Holzhacker (University of Twente and Amsterdam University College), Dr Philipp Kiiver (University of Maastricht), Professor Tapio Raunio (University of Tampere), Dr Carina Sprungk (Harvard University, University of Osnabruck), Dr Paul Stephenson (University of Maastricht)
