the european union as the next step of delegation and accountability

European Journal of Political Research37: 415–429, 2000.© 2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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The European Union as the next step of delegation andaccountability

TORBJÖRN BERGMANUmeå University, Umeå, Sweden

Abstract. The Principal-Agent approach guides a comparison of the scrutiny and imple-mentation records of the EU member states. The main argument is that there is systematicco-variation. Cross-nationally, an influential scrutiny process is associated with a strong im-plementation record. But because both of these variables also co-vary with the North-Southdimension of EU politics, a fundamental challenge for future research is to evaluate the import-ance of existing between-country variation relative to the new Principal-Agent relationshipsthat are emerging within the integration process.

Introduction

At the level of the nation state, there are four major steps in an ideal-typicalparliamentary democracy (Strøm 2000). A chain of delegation and account-ability runs from the people (voters) to the MPs in the parliament, fromparliament to cabinet, from the cabinet as a whole and the Prime Minis-ter to individual ministers and from ministers to civil servants. In Europe,these four main principal-agent relationships are intertwined with the insti-tutions of the European Union (Lupia 2000). For the member states of theEuropean Union (EU), the fifth step of delegation – domestic delegation tothe EU – can be troublesome due to the general delegation problems thatLupia & McCubbins (2000) present in this issue. In addition, compared todelegation at the national level, EU ‘multi-level governance’ (Scharpf 1997)involves complexities concerning multiple principals and multiple agentswho have different powers and competencies and compete for influence andaccountability both domestically and supranationally. This creates a new andchallenging research agenda. While all the complex relationships cannot beconsidered here,1 some initial observations about the principal-agent rela-tionships between member states (MS) and EU institutions can be made. Themain argument is that these relationships vary systematically.

The impact of the EU on domestic politics is a major theme in currentresearch on the European Union (Mény et al. 1996; Hanf & Soetendorp 1998;Risse et al. 1999; Wessels 1999). Some of the literature deals explicitly withdemocracy, national politics and parliaments (most of the research on this is-

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sue is either found or cited in Andersen & Eliassen 1996; Norton 1996; Smith1996; Bergman 1997; Wiberg 1997; Raunio 1999; Wessels 1999). However,few studies share our explicit concern with delegation and accountabilityproblems and our focus on principal-agent relationships.2

Notable exceptions are studies by Pollack (1977, 1999) and Tallberg(1999). The latter explores how the EU (as a principal) can hold its memberstates (as agents) accountable in the implementation of EU policy. Pollack, onthe other hand, is more concerned with the reverse relationship, namely howmember states (as principals) can hold EU institutions (as agents) account-able. In this study I analyse the relationship between the domestic scrutinyprocess (MS as principal, EU as agent) and the implementation process (EUas principal, MS as agent).

The importance of these relationships goes beyond the MS. For example, astriking finding in a recent study of the five Nordic countries is the distinct dif-ference between EU and EEA states with regard to the effects of delegation tosupranational institutions (Bergman & Damgaard 2000). The study includesthree EU member states (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden) and two neighbour-ing states (Norway and Iceland) that, through the European Economic Area(EEA), follow EU rules for the internal market without participating in formalEU decision-making. The EEA states largely lack institutional accountabilitymechanisms in their relations with the EU. However, even the three memberstates – indeed, all EU members – face democratic accountability problems.Below I briefly exemplify how the delegation&accountability approach canbe used to further study this important topic.

The Council of Ministers and national parliaments

The gradual extension of policy matters subject to majority voting rules hastransferred political authority from member states to the EU and, in particular,to the Council of Ministers.3 Member states have different weight in EUdecision-making, but it should be recognised that the EU is not an organ-isation that is primarily based on open conflict and majority voting.4 Thedominant mode of decision-making is through bargaining and negotiationwhich, according to the Commission, is helped by the existence of majorityvoting as the final remedy (General Report 1998: Ch. VIII, Section 2).

Because they have the right to unseat their respective cabinets and in-dividual ministers, national parliaments can hold their cabinet ministersaccountable for their behaviour in the Council.5 The majority in each of thenational parliaments can also decide whether or not accountability shouldbe exercised against a minister who has argued the national position but lostbecause of solid opposition from a majority bloc or even because he was voted

EUROPEAN UNION AS NEXT STEP OF DELEGATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY 417

down in the Council.6 However, this is a costly decision for a parliamentthat, on other matters, might support the cabinet. Thus, in most cases, thelikelihood that a minister will be forced to resign because of an EU decisionis marginal. On the other hand, it is important to note that the formation ofnew cabinets can alter the majority in the Council. This, in turn, can producechanges in important EU policy areas. The shift in cabinet power to SocialDemocratic and/or Green parties in France, Germany and the UK in the 1990smight perhaps signal such a change.

Short of the parliament removing the cabinet from power, the most directand important link between national parliaments and everyday decision-making in the EU is the one that involves the EU Affairs Committees ofthe member states. Together with other committees and plenary debates andresolutions, these EU Affairs Committees can influence cabinets’ position-taking in the EU Council. Through these committees, national parliamentscan ensure a measure of accountability in the process that leads up to an EUdecision. After an EU decision, it is up to each member state to act as an‘agent’ of the EU and implement the decision. These decisions are imple-mented by state agencies and courts. Many are first integrated into nationallaw by an act of parliament. The member states then report back to the Com-mission about how effectively they have implemented EU directives. For therespective member states, Table 1 presents the empirical record on scrutinyand implementation and a set of background variables that, hypothetically,can be expected to influence the empirical record.7

The accountability (scrutiny) process and the implementation record

Today all member states have some type of EU Affairs Committee (Corbett etal. 1995: 286–288; Bergman 1997). These committees commonly complainabout information-problems. However, it is usually not an overall lack ofinformation about EU matters that creates problem. Rather, problems havestemmed from the fact that the volume of information is often ‘too much,too late’. Information about upcoming EU proposals has often been incom-plete and sometimes not even translated from the working (French) language.The Amsterdam Treaty has introduced deadlines and guarantees a minimumperiod of notice for national parliaments, but the joint information-problem isnot likely to disappear. However, there is also substantial variation in the waythat the national parliaments have organised the national scrutiny process.

In some member states, the scrutiny process produces the national positionon a policy issue. In others, this process is at best an opportunity for thecabinet to pass information on to the parliament. Table 1 presents a rankingof the national scrutiny processes with respect to the influence that they have

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Table 1. Scrutiny and implementation of EU-decisions

Scrutiny Implementation Background variables

Member Ranking of Directives, No. of cases Minority cabinets, Catholic/orthodox, EU opponents,

state influence % of all to ECJ % of all % of population % of population

1996 1999 1996 1997 1997 1998 1970–1992 1995 1996 1998

Austria High 4 88.3 94.3 0 2 3 78 24 19

Belgium Low 11 92.7 91.8 18 19 2 90 15 9

Denmark High 1 98 97 0 0 92 0 21 20

Finland Moderate 2 80.9 96.3 0 0 7 0 22 21

France Low 10 91.8 93.6 15 22 29 74 13 12

Germany Moderate 5 93.5 93.6 19 4 0 35 13 11

Greece Low 15 91.2 92.8 10 17 15 98 8 9

Ireland Low 9 93 94.1 6 10 51 93 4 4

Italy Low 8 90.2 92.5 20 16 32 83 6 5

Luxembourg Low 12 93.4 94.2 8 11 0 94 7 6

Netherlands Moderate 7 97.3 96.4 3 3 5 33 6 6

Portugal Low 13 91.8 93.5 14 5 10 95 9 9

Spain Low 14 94.8 95.1 7 5 56 95 13 7

Sweden Moderate 3 93.8 97.3 0 0 81 0 36 36

UK Moderate 6 94.2 94.7 1 0 13 14 21 22

On scrutiny 1996, see Bergman (1997).Scrutiny 1999 is an estimate by the author.On Directives 1996, seeFourteenth Annual Report on Monitoring the Application of Community Law(JOC1998:332/14 – Swedish).On Directives 1997, seeFifteenth Annual Report on Monitoring the Application of Community Law(JOC1998:250/9 – Swedish).On ECJ cases 1997, seeFifteenth Annual Report on Monitoring the Application of Community Law(JOC1998:250/87 – Swedish).On ECJ cases 1998, seeGeneral Report on the Activities of the European Union 1998, Chapter IX, Section 1. The figures are reported to beprovisional rather than official. The official figures are not currently available, but in earlier years have the provisional figures turned out tobe quite correct.On minority cabinets 1970–1992, see Heidar & Berntzen (1998: 328).On Catholic/Orthodox share of population 1995, see Lane & Ersson (1999: 46).On EU ‘bad thing’ 1996, seeEurobarometer 45, Table 1.4.a). Fieldwork from February–March 1996.On EU ‘bad thing’ 1998, seeEurobarometer 50, Table 3.1.a. Fieldwork from October–November 1998.


on cabinet ministers. I have discussed the empirical variation in detail else-where (Bergman 1997). Table 1 summarises the most general pattern only.For comparative purposes, the 15 member are divided into three basic cat-egories. The category labelled Low signifies a process involving exchange ofinformation. It is largely an asymmetric process in which the cabinet informsthe parliaments about its conduct in EU Affairs. For countries classified asModerate, it is assumed that the cabinet normally will act upon a majorityrecommendation from the EU Affairs Committee or the parliament. In thesemember states, there is an element of negotiation and the outcome of theprocess is a policy position that the cabinet is not likely to ignore or discount.The last category is designated as High, which is used for the countries withthe most influential scrutiny process.

In the 1996 ranking, only Denmark and Austria are ranked as havinga strong scrutiny process. The most well known EU Affairs Committee isprobably the Danish one (Europaudvalget, formerly theMarkedsudvalget). Itwas the first to exercise real power over the cabinet and to send ministers backto Brussels to explain that the national parliament had rejected EU proposals.The Danish EU Affairs Committees provides the cabinet with a mandate that,in keeping with constitutional practice, it must follow. The strong Danish EUAffairs Committee is often explained with reference to the Danish record ofminority cabinets (see, for example, Pahre 1997, Martin 2000). In stark con-trast, Austria has a persistent record of strong majority cabinets. One couldtherefore expect Austria to have a weak scrutiny process (Pahre 1997).

Probably for the reason given by Pahre (1997), a strong pro-EU major-ity cabinet in power, the Austrian ranking for 1996 is an over-estimation ofcurrent scrutiny practices. The 1996 ranking is based on the constitutionalrules adopted for the scrutiny process. These rules were adopted at a timeat which the cabinet parties did not control the necessary two-third majorityrequired to pass the constitutional changes that were seen as prerequisites forEU membership. To reach this threshold they negotiated a compromise withtwo smaller opposition parties that, on paper, established what is probablythe most influential scrutiny process in all of the member states. Shortlythereafter, the two cabinet parties regained their two-thirds majority and theAustrian scrutiny process has not been as influential as the constitutionalstatutes actually would allow (Kaiser 1995; Fitzmaurice 1996; Müller 2000).The second column in Table 1 is my own attempt to correct for recent changesand rank the member states according to the current weight and influence ofthe scrutiny process in 1999. For some of the countries, for example Greece,available information is very scarce. Thus, this ranking is only a first andhighly explorative attempt to construct an update of the 1996 data and a moredetailed ranking of the member states.


Member state effectiveness in implementation is measured in two ways.First, for 1996 and 1997, the most recent years currently available, I listthe implementation records that have been collected and presented by theCommission. The data for 1996 reveals some surprisingly low numbers forFinland and Austria. However, both countries were only in their second yearof membership and, in the Finnish case, most of the problems can be at-tributed to problems with implementation on the semi-autonomous islandof Åland (Fifteenth Annual Report-1997: 9). In the figures for 1997, these‘outlier’ problems have been corrected and the gap between the countrieswith the best and worst performance has narrowed considerably. However,both measurers are based on self-reporting by member states, which cancause bias. As an alternative, the other measure of the implementation recordprovides information on the number of cases that the Commission has passedon to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for breaches of EU law. These datacovers the last two years for which data is currently available.

Three background variables that can help shed light on the cross-nationalvariation are also listed in Table 1. Share of minority governments duringthe period 1970–1992 is meant to capture the likelihood that the cabinet ina particular member state is in conflict with the parliament. This, in turn,is partly a proxy for the fact that certain institutional settings facilitate theformation of minority cabinets (Strøm 1990; Bergman 1993). The share ofthe population that is Catholic or Orthodox – as opposed to Protestant andother – is a proxy for differences in political culture. It reflects a long standingapproach to explaining variation in politics, one used by important scholarssuch as Robert Putnam (1993) and Francis Castles (1994; 1998), not to men-tion Weber (1904–1905). I use the concept of political culture in a broad senseand the proxy is an attempt to capture the long-standing mix of historical,institutional and cultural patterns that vary across the member states.

Through surveys published in theEurobarometer, a number of measuresof popular support for the EU are available. The one used here is the shareof the population that answers ‘a bad thing’ to the following question “Gen-erally speaking, do you think that (OUR COUNTRY’S) membership of theEuropean Union is . . . ?: Agood thing; A bad thing; Neither good nor bad;Don’t Know”. This question was chosen because almost regardless of theactual distribution of the other categories, if a sizeable part of the electorateis against the EU as such, politicians will see the EU opposition as important.They will take it into account when they try to play on anti-EU sentimentto win support, or when they take measures to increase the legitimacy of theEuropean Union. I have included data for two years; 1996, which includesthen-newcomers, Austria, Finland, and Sweden. The other is the most recentdata for which fieldwork was conducted in the fall of 1998.


With a mix of ordinal and interval type data and only 15 data-points, arank-order test of association is appropriate. Spearman’s rho (also known asrank order correlation) compares the rank of individuals (Kurtz 1999: 300–303) – in this case member states. Aron & Aron (1997: 258) report that aregular t-test is probably robust enough to be used on ranked data, but for ourpurposes we follow the Spearman test. This means that for 15 countries, onlya correlation of .53 or higher is significant at the 05 level. In this case, we canreject the null hypothesis that the two rankings are independent (Levin & Fox1997: 326–331, 392). Table 2 presents the results.

With one major exception, the rank-order correlations presented in Table 2show that the indicators intended to measure the same factors actually do so.The two scrutiny rankings are correlated at 0.80. The two measures of imple-mentation effectiveness are also strongly associated. The correlation betweenshare of implemented Directives at the end of 1997 and number of casesbrought before the ECJ in 1997 is 0.86, for 1998 court cases the correlationis 0.82. The correlation between attitudinal data (EU membership is a ‘bad’thing) for 1996 and 1998 is 0.91.

The one exception is the record of implemented directives at the end of1996. There is a borderline level association (0.53) between 1996 and the1997 implementation records. However, this indicator is unrelated to the othermeasures of implementation. Since there is a strong correlation between theother three indicators for implementation, the results suggest that the data fordirectives in 1996 might be somehow flawed or exceptional. For example, itmight be that the newcomers Austria and Finland either had problems withthe self-reporting of implementation or short-term problems with the actualimplementation (e.g., the example of the island of Åland mentioned above).These problems appear to have been corrected in the latest data. From Table 1,it is also apparent that the differences between the member states on thisindicator diminish over time, but the variation is still important.

When it comes to the strength of the association between variables thatmeasure different phenomena, the 1996 estimate of the influence of thescrutiny processes is strongly associated with the three measures of imple-mentation effectiveness: Directives 1997 (0.55), ECJ 1997 (0.65) and ECJ 98(0.80). The 1999 ranking has very similar numbers for the three measurers ofimplementation effectiveness.

The share of minority cabinets shows little or no sign of being associatedwith the other measures. A distinction should therefore probably be madebetween the impact of minority situations in a particular case and the over-all cross-national pattern. The direct impact in a minority situation (e.g., inDenmark) and other unfavourable bargain situations for a cabinet (see theAustrian example above) can be very important at critical moments. However,

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Table 2. Spearman’s rank-order correlations

Scrutiny Implementation Background variables

Member Ranking of Directives, No. of cases Minority cabinets, Catholic/orthodox, EU opponents,

state influence % of all to ECJ % of all % of population % of population

1996 1999 1996 1997 1997 1998 1970–1992 1995 1996 1998

Scrutiny 1996 1.0

Scrutiny 1999 0.85 1.0

Directives 1996 0.09 0.11 1.0

Directives 1997 0.55 0.61 0.53 1.0

ECJ 1997 0.65 0.60 0.21 0.86 1.0

ECJ 1998 0.80 0.77 0.35 0.82 0.80 1.0

Minority % 0.14 0.18 0.36 0.39 0.37 0.32 1.0

Cath/Orth 0.71 0.92 0.24 0.65 0.54 0.71 0.25 1.0

EU Bad 1996 0.78 0.62 −0.03 0.44 0.55 0.61 0.22 0.62 1.0

EU Bad 1998 0.78 0.61 0.02 0.46 0.54 0.62 0.27 0.67 0.91 1.0

The data in Table 1 has been transformed to rank-order and correlations have been generated using Spearman’s rho. Bold identifies the rank-ordercorrelations for which the null-hypothesis of no association can be rejected at the 0.05 level.


contrary to Pahre (1997) and Martin (2000), the cross-national pattern seemsto be that neither the scrutiny process nor the effectiveness of implementationvaries with the record of minority cabinets. This is probably because minoritycabinets form for varying reasons. Some form from a position of weakness,which can make conflict with the parliament more likely. However, partiessometimes also form minority cabinets from a position of strength (Strøm1990), which lessens the potential for conflict the parliament. Thus, the exist-ence of minority cabinets might simply be a bad proxy for the potential for aconflict between the cabinet and the parliament in EU affairs.

Other background variables, such as basic differences in social and polit-ical orientation and the size of the EU opposition among the population,apparently affect how member states relate to the EU. The Catholic/Orthodoxproxy for political culture is significantly associated with the scrutiny rankingfor 1996 (0.71), the scrutiny ranking for 1999 (0.92), the implementation re-cord for directives in 1997 (0.65) and the number of court cases in 1997 (0.55)and 1998 (0.71). In fact, the strength of the scrutiny process and implementa-tion measured by number of court cases are also significantly associated withattitudinal data (EU ‘bad’ thing). The attitudinal data, however, do not clearlyco-vary with the implementation rate of Directives.

In sum, with the exception of the 1996 data on directives, the main resultis that there is a strong relationship between the scrutiny process and theimplementation record. A country with an influential scrutiny process is verylikely to also have a record of effective implementation. The strongest rela-tionship is between (1) a strong scrutiny process (both in 1996 and 1999) and(2) a low record of cases brought to the ECJ in the last year (1998). However,both variables also co-vary with (3) the Catholic/Orthodox proxy for politicalculture. How should this empirical record be understood?

Conclusion

In an ideal-typical parliamentary democracy, principal-agent relations arestraightforward. In practice, the chain is far from perfect, but the delegationand accountability approach is a very useful starting point for identifyingdeviations between ideal-type and political practice. Delegation to the EUcreates very complex links. In some respects, the EU is an agent of the mem-ber states. In other respects, the member states are (agents) bound to followcollective and majority decisions made by supranational institutions. It is stilltrue that the EU primarily works as a negotiation-based organisation and thatfew decisions are made against the core interest of any of its member states.However, the agency problems are both important and under-researched.


In the data presented above, member states tend to cluster in three ma-jor groups. One group includes the countries at the southern border of theEU: Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. These are countries in which theaccountability process in EU affairs is weak and effectiveness with regardto implementation is relatively low. This group also includes other memberstates with similar scrutiny and implementation records – Belgium, France,Luxembourg, and Ireland – which are geographically more in the centre ofWestern Europe. These eight countries belong to a group that can be labelledthe centre-south group of member states. It is also possible to identify twoother groups. One consists of a set of countries placed between the far northand the centre-south. This centre-north group includes Austria, Germany, theNetherlands and the UK. Relative to the centre-south, the scrutiny of EUaffairs is more active and implementation is handled more effectively. The lastgroup consists of the Nordic member states, Denmark, Finland and Sweden.These three countries place the most emphasis on scrutiny and implementEU decisions most efficiently. The Scandinavian member states also havesomewhat different background characteristics: the dominant political cultureis protestant in origin and a large share of the population is opposed to EUmembership.

What does this imply about the co-variation between the scrutiny record,the implementation record and background variables such as political culture?Is the strong relationship between the scrutiny record and implementation acausal one or spurious correlation?

The correlation is spurious in the sense that both records largely stem frombetween-country variation (i.e., so called country effects).8 Causal claimsconcerning the scrutiny-implementation relationship should be made withgreat caution. This is because the different roles of the national parliamentswithin the EU are very much a product of long-standing historical, institu-tional and cultural patterns in the member states. As for the implementationrecord, member state based bureaucracies have administrative routines andprocedures that were important already before a scrutiny process in EU affairswas invented and this still accounts for much of the remaining variation inthe EU implementation record. The variation in the implementation recordof the member states is more a story of variation in administrative capacityand effectiveness than of the willingness of the parliament to implement EUdecisions.9 With respect to the scrutiny and implementation records of themember states, there is an underlying north-south dimension in EU politicsthat largely explains what seems to be a causal link.

This does not mean that the traditional patterns of between-country vari-ation are destined to remain the same. They are being affected by the impactof integration. One example is the establishment of EU Affairs Committees


in all the national parliaments. Another is the apparent decline in the vari-ation of the implementation records of the member states. Thus, studies ofthe link between the EU and national politics are studies of both continuityand change. In further research on EU affairs, both the principal-agent andother approaches to studying the EU must grapple with the dual impact oftraditional between-country differences and new relationships that emergewithin the EU. In such studies, one advantage of the principal-agent approachthat is presented in this special issue is that it is built on precise and consistentfoundations. Another is that it focuses our attention on the central issue ofdemocratic accountability.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my fellow editors, two reviewers and Hans Hegeland, CindyKite and Tapio Raunio for their insightful comments on an earlier version ofthis article.

Notes

1. In the EU, supranational institutions pool the sovereignty of long-established and de-veloped democracies in hitherto unknown ways, but European politics is still essentiallynational. Most powers, public interest, media attention and legitimacy still reside withthe nation-states. In addition, EU institutions are not designed upon the principles ofparliamentary democracy. There are no executive power holders that base their powersand tenure on European-wide elections. There are of course elections to the Europeanparliament on a EU-wide basis, but since there are no real European wide parties and verylittle European-wide media these are still ‘second-order’ elections (on EP elections see,for example, Hix 1999: 180–184). With the Amsterdam Treaty, the European Parliament(EP) has become a more important legislature, but the EU has not moved much in thedirection of a parliamentary democracy. The EP is asked to confirm a new Commissionthat has been suggested by the member states. The European Parliament can also removethe Commission from power. But the Commission is not a cabinet. The Commission ismore analogous to an executive committee of high Civil Servants. Even if the Councilis far from being the only important institution (Hayes-Renshaw & Wallace 1995), themain political power holders are sent by the cabinets of the member states and sit in theCouncil. Only if the European Parliament had the power to remove Council memberscould we reasonably talk about the EU as having more than a vague resemblance to theparliamentary democracies of its member states.

2. The P&A approach could also be used to study the relationships between the supra-national institutions of the EU. The weak position of the directly elected EuropeanParliament relative to the Commission and the Council is often referred to as the EU’s‘democratic deficit’ (Chryssochoou 1998). This involves a number of agency prob-lems. The heavy criticism of the Santer Commission in the spring of 1999 by theAudit report and the European Parliament is a striking example (First Report 1999,


Bulletin 3-1999:1.10.2). However, for this special issue, the relationship between supra-national institutions is of less concern than the relationship between the EU and nationalparliamentary democracy.

3. In this process, the major building blocs have been the Single European Act, which wentinto effect on 1 July 1987, and the Treaty on European Union (TEU) – commonly knownas the Maastricht Treaty – which turned the European Community (EC) into the EuropeanUnion on 1 November 1993. A new treaty, the so-called Amsterdam Treaty, was signedin 1997 and went into effect on 1 May 1999. This treaty significantly strengthens the roleof the European Parliament in the legislative process, but the member state based Councilis still the most important policy-making EU body. According to these treaties, the Unionhas powers that historically have been associated with the nation state. In policy areas suchas the internal market, agricultural policy, transport policy, competition policy, certainenvironmental legislation and trade relations with other countries, EU decision-makingsupersedes national institutions.

4. Votes in the EU Council of Ministers are weighted very roughly by the size of a country’spopulation. The member states have following number of votes in the Council (votes inparenthesis): Austria (4), Belgium (5), Denmark (3), Germany (10), Greece (5), Finland(3), France (10), Ireland (3), Italy (10), Luxembourg (2), the Netherlands (5), Portugal(5), Sweden (4), and Spain (8), and Great Britain (10).

5. According to theCommission Report for the Reflection Group(1995: 27), national par-liaments are involved in nine types of EU decisions. Aside from the treaty ratificationprocess, this includes third pillar decision-making and, not least, the obligation to trans-pose EU directives. However, their most important possibility to exercise authority ineveryday EU decision-making stems from their power to dismiss cabinets and cabinetministers. The national parliaments’ authority to remove their cabinets from power –i.e., not only through impeachment procedures and other extraordinary measurers – issomething that separates the constitutional arrangements of the member states from thoseof, for example, Switzerland and the USA.

6. This assumes that the national parliament can access accurate information about the ac-tions of the minister. That they can do so is helped by the fact that the EU, including theCouncil, have taken steps to ensure further openness. Moreover, even if some documentscan be difficult to access, the EU is hardly known for being good at keeping secrets.

7. As part of a sophisticated argument concerning the role of legislatures in internationalpolitics, Lisa Martin (2000) proposes that the more conflict there is in the executive-legislative relationship, the better developed is the scrutiny process in EU affairs. Shealso argues that a parliament active in EU affairs is an important explanation of the extentto which member states implement EU decisions. This article is not designed to be a testof her overall argument, but the results show that it is likely that she underestimates theimpact of member-state variation in terms of different administrative cultures and over-estimates the importance of the executive-legislature relationship (at least as measured interms of the share of minority cabinets).

8. In a regular OLS regression, at the 0.05 level, both scrutiny measures (1996 and 1999)are significant explanations of the 1997 directives and the 1998 ECJ cases, respectively.The Catholic/Orthodox variable performs equally well as a predictor of the implement-ation record. When both the scrutiny and the Catholic/Orthodox variables are enteredsimultaneously, neither variable provides a significant explanation of the ECJ cases. Inthe case of the 1997 directives, only the Catholic/Orthodox variable remains significant.There thus appears to be multicollinearity problem, which can be seen as a warning that


there might be a spurious correlation problem. In addition to the small N problem and themix of ordinal and interval data, this is why rank-order correlations are appropriate for ananalysis of the available data.

9. This is also the conclusion reached in a study of the cross-national variation in theimplementation records of the EU member states (Tallberg 1998). Peter Haas (1998)takes another view and speaks about nation states’ choices about whether to comply ornot. However, there is little or no empirical evidence that states consciously make suchchoices.

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the european union as the next step of delegation and accountability

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