Regional Parliaments Questioning EU Affairs

Since the Treaty of Lisbon, the desire of parliaments to adapt to their new powers has led to a new wave of Europeanization (Hefftler et al. 2015). However, the Early Warning System (EWS) and the Political Dialogue with the Commission only constitute one small part of parliamentary scrutiny for regional parliaments, which still largely rely on traditional tools such as mandates, debates and questions. Therefore, this paper studies a traditional mechanism of scrutiny, parliamentary questions, in order to understand the degree of Europeanization of regional parliaments and their interest in different parliamentary functions more fully. The study shows that the Europeanization of traditional scrutiny mechanisms is progressing slowly, but also that the proportion of MPs who ask EU-related questions is now relatively high. The vast majority of these MPs are not members of the European Affairs Committee. The main functions of parliamentary questions are a representative function and information function. Finally, the focus and content of parliamentary questions show that regional parliaments do indeed have a distinctive territorial approach to EU affairs.