Explaining subnational parliamentary scrutiny powers ...

Regional & Federal Studies

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Explaining subnational parliamentary scrutiny powers: A fuzzy-set analysis of German Landtage Aron Buzogány & Jens R. Häsing To cite this article: Aron Buzogány & Jens R. Häsing (2018): Explaining subnational parliamentary scrutiny powers: A fuzzy-set analysis of German Landtage, Regional & Federal Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13597566.2018.1474459 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2018.1474459

Published online: 21 May 2018.

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REGIONAL AND FEDERAL STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2018.1474459

Explaining subnational parliamentary scrutiny powers: A fuzzy-set analysis of German Landtage Aron Buzogány

a

and Jens R. Häsingb

a

Department of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria; bFreie Universitat Berlin Otto-Suhr-Institut fur Politikwissenschaft, Chair of German Politics, Berlin, Germany ABSTRACT

While the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty has important implications for regional parliaments with legislative competences, most studies have focused on cross-country differences or examined the activities of regional parliaments at the EU level. This contribution shows the existence of substantial intracountry differences in the formal scrutiny rights of regional parliaments. We analyse how German regional parliaments (Landtage) have addressed the challenge of controlling their governments in EU affairs. Using fuzzy-set comparative qualitative analysis, we find that institutional and partisan factors (vote share in the second chamber, economic potential, and conservative governments) explain the differences found among German Landtage particularly well. Landtage with otherwise weak parliamentary prerogatives were successful in using the reform momentum to strengthen their rights in the field of EU policy. Combined with the party political salience of EU policymaking, the integration process has thus empowered formally weaker Landtage. KEYWORDS Regional parliaments; parliamentary rights; European Politics; Germany; QCA (qualitative

comparative analysis)

Introduction The literature on multi-level regionalism in the European Union (EU) has often argued that regions in the Member States have profited from the establishment of the multi-level architecture of the EU as this offered them the opportunity to circumvent the national level. Not only have regions firmly established themselves on the European level (Tatham 2016), they have also started to co-shape policies at the EU level and interfere with their implementation on the ground (Bauer and Börzel 2011; Högenauer 2014). While this literature has typically perceived regions as unified actors represented by their governments, another part of the literature has focused on how organs controlling regional governments – i.e. regional parliaments CONTACT Aron Buzogány [email protected] Department of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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A. BUZOGÁNY AND J. R. HÄSING

– have adapted to the challenges of Europeanization (Raunio and Wright 2006; Bussjäger 2010; Carter 2013). Normative or functional claims are often used to highlight why regional parliaments (should) matter in EU affairs. In normative terms, including the regional level might be an important remedy to the EU’s democratic deficit (Högenauer and Abels 2017). Functionally, as the regional level holds substantial competencies in many EU policies and is often formally in charge of the implementation of EU directives (Borghetto and Franchino 2010; De Coninck and Van Hecke 2018), involving regional parliaments which are closer to the citizens might lead to both better and more accepted solutions (Bursens and Högenauer 2017). While regional parliaments were usually regarded in the literature as ‘losers of integration’, these findings were challenged recently by studies suggesting that the Lisbon Treaty has provided a new momentum also for regional parliaments to become more active in EU affairs (Abels and Eppler 2015; Bursens and Högenauer 2017). Even if the extensions of parliamentary rights in the Treaty mainly concern national parliaments and the European Parliament, regional parliaments are also affected in at least two ways. First, the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty concerning the Early Warning System (EWS) allocate two votes to the parliament(s) of each member state. In case a member state has a bicameral system, these votes are evenly split between the two chambers. This institutional design sets second chambers on par with first chambers – and does so by potentially interfering with the domestic power distribution between them. As second chambers often carry a regional component, this can be understood as a strengthening of the regional level to deal with EU affairs. A second effect is more direct and concerns the role of regional parliaments. The same Article 6 to Protocol 2 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) mentions not only chambers of the national parliament but, ‘where appropriate’, also regional parliaments with legislative powers among the addresses of the EWS (Abels and Eppler 2015; Bursens and Högenauer 2017) Research on the implications of the EWS for regional parliaments shows highly differential adjustment processes and coping strategies, but we still lack systematic knowledge about regional parliament’s adaptation and the factors that might explain these differences (Högenauer and Abels 2017, 261). Therefore, this contribution aims to analyse the conditions under which regional parliaments show high levels of formal scrutiny rights in EU affairs. We focus on German regions and seek to explain the differences across the 16 regional parliaments (Landtage) in scrutinizing their governments. As expected by the literature on ‘differential impact of Europe’ (Börzel and Risse 2003), our findings suggest that European integration does not lead to institutional convergence on the domestic level but differentially empowers some actors vis-á-vis others. We show that partisan and institutional factors (conservative governments, economic potential, and vote

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share in the second chamber) explain the differences found among German Landtage. Landtage with strong scrutiny rights unrelated to EU issues hold weaker scrutiny powers when it comes to EU Affairs. This underlines that the strengthening of parliamentary participation rights which most Landtage have introduced several decades ago are largely independent of their current empowerment in EU affairs and EU scrutiny remains a still novel feature of German regional parliamentarianism. We use factors derived from on the Europeanization of national parliaments (see Auel, Rozenberg, and Tacea 2015 for an overview) and on intergovernmental relations in the German federal system (Behnke and Kropp 2016; Benz 2017). We complement this with insights from an original qualitative research project that focused on executive–legislative relations at the Länder level and was carried out between 2013 and 2015 (Buzogány and Häsing 2017; Häsing and Buzogány 2015). To interpret the results, we use fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), a technique well suited to analyse a medium to small number of cases as this allows to examine which conditions – or combinations of conditions – are necessary or sufficient to explain different levels of parliamentary scrutiny by regional parliaments. The next section starts with a short state of the art of the literature on regional parliaments in the EU. Then, we discuss the role of regional parliaments in the German federal system and describe their differential formal adaptation processes following the Lisbon Treaty. We quantify these differences by developing a novel index which includes informational, mandating, and administrative components. In a next step, we identify different conditions that have been hypothesized in the literature to explain these differences. We apply fsQCA to detect the different solutions German Landtage have chosen. The following section explains the method and provides details about data operationalization and calibration. Then, we apply the identified conditions to explain the differing formal scrutiny powers of the Landtage and present the different pathways leading to strong EU scrutiny of parliaments. The final section concludes by summarizing the results, discussing their implications as well as highlighting new questions to be answered in research on regional parliaments in the EU.

Regional parliaments and the EU State of the art While both earlier and current accounts of the Europeanization of federal states are dominated by a focus on regional executive actors (Börzel 2002; Tatham 2016), there has been recently a growing interest in regional parliaments’ activities dealing with EU affairs. Researchers have started taking a

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more comprehensive look on how regional parliaments scrutinize EU policies by looking at the use of parliamentary control in general (Randour and Wolfs 2017) or at parliamentary questions in particular (Högenauer 2017). New publications have analysed networking among regional parliaments (Eppler and Maurer 2017), activities of regional MPs (Wonka and Rittberger 2014), of parliamentary bureaucracies (Högenauer, Neuhold, and Christiansen 2016; Pegan and Högenauer 2016; Buzogány and Häsing 2017), or the role played by regional parliaments in implementing EU legislation (Högenauer 2014; De Coninck and Van Hecke 2018). Another part of this research has focused more closely on the implications of the Lisbon Treaty – including the establishment of the EWS – on regional parliaments (Vandamme 2012; Abels 2013; Abels and Eppler 2015; Borońska-Hryniewiecka 2015; Vara Arribas and Högenauer 2015; Fromage 2016, 2017; Abels 2017; Bursens and Högenauer 2017). The (potential) empowerment of regional parliaments through the EU’s Lisbon Treaty contradicts the widespread perception of a ‘parliamentary decay’ at the regional level, whether related to European integration or not (Oberreuter 2010). At the same time, empowering regional parliaments in EU affairs remains critically disputed in the literature (see, e.g. contributions in Abels and Eppler 2015) as it might multiply representation channels, provoke complex principal–agent problems through bypassing federal hierarchies, or might just further complicate multi-level coordination in EU affairs (Beichelt 2007; Hegele 2016). Borońska-Hryniewiecka (2015, 2017) and Abels (2013, 2017) analysed cross-country variations in subnational parliamentary mobilization understood as formal institutional adjustment. Their results suggest that regional executive–legislative relations and the position of the regional executive in domestic governance arrangements explain the differences in the adaptation of regional parliaments in different EU member states to the Lisbon Treaty. Building on their work, our article takes a step further and contributes to the research on regional parliaments in the EU by explaining within-country variation in the adoption of formal scrutiny of EU affairs among German regional parliaments. In doing so, we follow calls to ‘go subnational’ voiced in the broader comparative politics literature (Snyder 2001). Germany is particularly promising for such comparative assessments (Behnke and Kropp 2016; Reutter 2017). Not only is, first, German federalism well-developed with regional competences relatively clearly structured and with political parties providing interlinkages between the different levels. At the same time, second, assessing the divergent adaptation processes of Landtage is also promising given the constraints posed by Germany’s ‘executive federalism’ to regional parliamentarianism (Mielke and Reutter 2013).


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EU-related scrutiny powers of German Landtage The importance of EU policies for the Länder has increased drastically over the last decades because of the need to comply with EU directives. This has led the federal level to adopt legislation forcing the regional level paying redress in case of Länder non-compliance.1 However, German regional parliaments were considered to play only a minor role in European affairs. The few studies that have dealt with German regional parliaments in EU affairs have all argued that Landtage are, despite some organizational reforms – such as the establishment of European Affairs Committees (EACs) – very weak actors (Johne 2000; Bauer 2005). The arguably most important hindrance to a more active role of Landtage in EU affairs resulted from the very construction of German federalism, which oscillates between ‘executive federalism’ and ‘Politikverflechtung’ (joint decision-making) (Benz 2017). Most German laws originate at the federal level but are implemented by Länder administrations. At the same time, the regional level remains an important co-decision-maker via the second chamber – the Bundesrat – because its approval is needed for important laws to pass. However, the elected bodies at the Länder level – the Landtage – face serious obstacles in their ability to co-decide: The Bundesrat is an executive body of governments. Therefore, regional governments, and not regional parliaments, have traditionally dominated EU-related policy-making in Germany. However, because the Bundesrat is technically also a second chamber, the parliamentary strengthening envisioned by the Lisbon Treaty –including the participation of regional parliaments in the EWS – has, at first sight at least, benefited executive actors: the Länder governments. The so-called Lisbon Decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) calling upon the Bundestag and the Bundesrat to take hold of their ‘integration responsibility’ (Integrationsverantwortung) has led to a momentum giving Landtage the opportunity to request new scrutiny rights – even though the GFCC’s decision did not mention them directly (Buzogány and Stuchlík 2012). Looking closer at the adaptation process of regional parliaments, recent analyses of institutional changes that took into account the Lisbon Treaty reforms show increased activism of the Landtage in dealing with EU issues (Claus and Rheinberger 2011; Böhm 2016; Abels 2013, 2017). Abels (2013) argues that the focusing event in this process took place at the regular Annual Conference of the German and Austrian Presidents of the Landtage in 2010 in Stuttgart, where the former GFCC Judge Hans-Jürgen Papier gave a speech arguing that regional parliaments ‘have to pull the emergency brake’ to avoid the further loss of their parliamentary powers. Papier encouraged the Landtage to call for new institutional regulations binding governments to parliamentary decisions. The Stuttgart Conference became a

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milestone for the decisions of the Landtage to strengthen their formal oversight rights (Abels 2013, 358). The first reaction to Papier’s speech came from the Land Baden-Württemberg, which amended its constitution by postulating that due to the transfer of Land competencies to the European level, the Land government is bound to parliamentary approval if European policy proposals affect these competencies. Following the pioneering role of the Stuttgart Landtag, most Länder followed suit either by amending their constitutions and/or by adopting new inter-institutional agreements between parliaments and government. With only Bavaria and Thuringia going as far as Baden-Württemberg, most Länder opted for regulations calling upon their governments to inform Landtage about the most important policy proposals discussed at the European level as well as to consider parliament’s opinion.

Measuring the formal EU scrutiny powers of German Landtage To measure EU-related powers of regional parliaments, we rely on the scholarship dealing with national parliament’s scrutiny powers but include some important adjustments which reflect specificities of the regional context (Abels 2013, 2017). The literature on parliamentary scrutiny capacities differentiates between informational, mandating, and administrative factors. Thomas Winzen (2012) introduced an index that relies on institutional agreements and includes the dimensions (a) parliamentary access to information, (b) role of the committee system in handling EU affairs, and (c) mandating rights of the parliament. We argue that for regional parliaments, access to information and evaluation of EU policy drafts by the regional government is even more important than it is for national parliaments, as the Lisbon Treaty does not warrant regional parliaments the right of direct access to information from the European Commission. Landtage need thus to rely on cooperation with their governments. Another difference to be taken into account concerns the role of EACs. While for national parliaments researchers have described the ‘mainstreaming’ of EU affairs as an eminent trend and argued the EU control is carried out less in EACs but in specialized committees (Gattermann, Högenauer, and Huff 2016), the literature shows that at the regional level EACs tend to remain in charge with EU affairs (Häsing and Buzogány 2015; Randour and Wolfs 2017). We build on the above literature to construct an index of Landtage’s ‘Formal EU-Scrutiny Power’.2 In doing so, we rely on official statutes regarding intra-institutional arrangements in EU affairs between Landtage and their respective government. We supplement this with information gathered through in-depth interviews with civil servants of parliamentary and executive staff working on EU affairs in 15 out of 16 German Länder (see Appendix 2 for details). Our measure of EU scrutiny powers is an index based on the three


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main dimensions identified in the literature as improving a parliament’s formal capacity to deal with EU affairs: informational features, mandating rights, and administrative resources. We include two measures for informational features (access to information from regional and federal bureaucracies). Mandating rights are captured by the institutional strength of Landtage in formal, legal terms (Abels 2017). Finally, we use two measures of administrative resources of German Landtage. Altogether, our index consists of five different features which are discussed in detail below.

Access to information from the regional government The main difference between governments and parliaments concerning EU affairs concerns government’s privileged access to information throughout the European policy cycle. We find important differences in the scope and the manner of information provided by governments. When considering formal regulations, in 9 of the 16 cases regional governments have the duty to provide subsidiarity assessments (see Table A1). These assessments vary considerably in content and quality. Some comprise comprehensive statements by the government while others include merely provisional evaluations based on information from the competent department (Interview 5). Interviews confirm government assessments to be a crucial source of information for several Landtage (Interview 1, Interview 3). Access to information from the federal government Regional governments have access to classified information regarding EU policies from the federal government through the federal government’s ‘EUDISYS’ information platform to which Landtage lack access. Several regional governments forward the internal reports of the federal government on EWS-related documents (Berichtsbögen der Bundesregierung) to their parliaments nevertheless (Table A1). Thuringia is an outlier as the access to these reports is officially guaranteed by the intra-institutional agreement between Landtag and government.3 Other regional governments forward these documents informally, much to the dislike of the federal government (Interview 2, Interview 3, and Interview 4). Mandating An important sign for a parliament’s institutional capacity to control its governments is the possibility to bind the government to parliamentary decisions. Studies on national parliamentary control include mandating powers in the indices of parliamentary strength (Raunio 2005; Winzen 2012). However, only few Landtage have established such instruments as most regional governments refused to provide strong mandating rights (Abels 2017).

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Parliamentary staff Some Länder governments are obliged to assess whether the subsidiarity principle is violated by an EU draft. However, this information is usually unavailable to MPs. Depending on the available parliamentary resources, some regional parliaments have parliamentary staff in place to prepare own reports or dossiers on subsidiarity concerns related to EU policies (see Table A1). These reports include additional information and summaries of how other Länder handle certain topics. These comparative overviews are an important source of information for MPs (Interview 6). At the same time, it remains difficult to assess the actual manpower of parliaments recruited specially to deal with the EWS (Interview 6). In most cases, the job descriptions are more complex and include other tasks as well. What we can measure is only whether parliamentary staff is regularly providing additional reports on EU matters or not

Observer in Brussels While regional governments have already established themselves as actors at the Brussels level more than a decade ago (Moore 2006), regional parliaments were much slower to follow suit. As part of the institutional reforms following the Lisbon Treaty, eight Landtage have sent own observers to Brussels by 2017. These ‘listening posts’ (Horchposten) were created to gather and process information in advance and independently from the government. The main task of these offices of regional parliaments is to identify upcoming policy proposals by the European Commission or other important actors in Brussels with relevance to their respective Land. While there is some doubt whether these parliamentary observers can act autonomously from their government as some even used to have their desk in the regional representation, already the fact that these positions were created seems to prove the interest of the Landtag to become more active in this field. We include these administrative factors in our index because of their importance for gathering information independently from the government and in advance the drafts coming from the European Commission (Högenauer and Neuhold 2015). We use simple numerical valuation to reflect the components of the index (0 = non-occurrence, 0.5 = limited occurrence, and 1 = full occurrence). Values across the five components of the index were added to create the overall formal scrutiny powers index (see Table A1). Figure 1 shows that the formal scrutiny powers are unevenly distributed among German Landtage, with Baden-Württemberg, Thuringia, and Bavaria holding the strongest rights, while those in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Rhineland-Palatinate are excessively weak.4 The cross-over line in Figure 1 distinguishes strong and weak Landtage, which will be relevant for the fsQCA analysis that follows (see Section 4 below).


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Figure 1. Ranking of formal EU scrutiny powers of German Landtage.

Explaining EU scrutiny powers of German Landtage After having defined and measured formal EU scrutiny of German Landtage, we proceed to identify factors explaining the variance found. Much like in the previous section, we rely on explanatory factors put forward in studies focusing on national parliaments. Researchers using similar methodological tools identified EU scepticism, political culture, and government composition as factors explaining the differences in formal scrutiny rights (Bergman 1997). Raunio (2005) has applied QCA to detect patterns among national parliaments before Eastern Enlargement, showing that the formal strength of parliaments is the only necessary condition associated with extensive scrutiny of EU affairs, while a combination of strong parliaments and a Eurosceptical public opinion was found to be a sufficient condition for stronger parliamentary scrutiny. Karlas (2012) provided another comparison of all EU member state’s parliaments by using fsQCA. He found combinations of (formally) strong committees, timing of EU accession, and frequent minority governments together with a fragmented party system to be the sufficient conditions for strong parliamentary control in EU affairs. Based on the dedicated literature, we thus expect parliamentary rights and partisan support for subsidiarity to play a role in explaining our outcome as well. Additionally, based on the literature on intergovernmental relations in the German federal system, we investigate the federal impact and economic power as contributing explanatory factors. In the following, we discuss these four conditions in detail.

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Strong parliamentary rights (parlright) Previous studies have described general parliamentary strength unrelated to European integration as an explanatory condition for EU-related scrutiny powers (see e.g. Raunio 2005; Karlas 2012). This variable includes, e.g. minority rights, rights of formation and dismissal of government, legislative activity, rights of individual MPs to participate in the legislative process. The argument is based on a path-dependent logic: If a parliament holds strong parliamentary rights in national-level policy-making, it will be able to protect them when new issues – such as EU integration – come onto the agenda. Following the literature on national parliamentary EU scrutiny, we expect that strong parliamentary rights unrelated to European affairs will lead to strong scrutiny rights also in EU issues.

Strong partisan support for subsidiarity (subs) The literature on parliamentary scrutiny expects partisan factors to play a role in explaining the variation of formal parliamentary rights. For example, Raunio (2005) showed that both party-based and public Euroscepticism are related to higher levels of scrutiny powers. In contrast to several EU member states where EU-related cleavages have played a role as integration gathered pace, depth, and width, Germany’s main political actors have converged around a positive evaluation of integration. While this consensus started eroding when conflicts concerning the scope of further integration became politicized, the new EU-sceptical party Alternative für Deutschland has only gathered strength after the Landtage have adopted the institutional changes related to the Lisbon Treaty. More important for our analysis is the party-based contention concerning EU integration on the regional level. While centre-left parties, such as the social democrats (SPD) and the Greens were strongly supportive of EU integration (Häsing and Buzogány 2018), regional factions of the conservative Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) are considered in the literature to hold up regional autonomy and a strict interpretation of subsidiarity (Turner and Rowe 2013). In fact, even subsidiarity as a concept is often thought to have its origins in Catholic social philosophy (Kaiser 2013), which lies at CDU’s ideational core and already the ‘CDU’s internal organisation reflects the federal character of Germany’s political system, and also the CDU’s normative attachment to subsidiarity’ (Turner 2013). This is even more true for the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) (Budich 2013). Thus, we expect Länder with conservative majorities to be more interested to formally strengthen ‘their’ Landtage, whereas centre-left governments will oppose this. CDU-led governments during our period of investigation were either grand coalitions with the SPD or minimal-wining coalitions with the liberal FDP. However, as the


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responsibility for dealing with EU affairs was in all cases located at the Prime Minister’s Office (Staatskanzlei), we do not expect coalition partners having a strong influence in EU-related policy-making (Bauer 2005).

Strong federal impact (fedimp) While studies on national-level parliamentary scrutiny powers usually neglect this factor, we expect that size difference between Länder is a factor shaping their interests to actively participate in EU affairs. Especially Länder playing a pivotal role in the German federal system could be particularly interested in engaging in EU affairs as this offers them the opportunity circumventing the federal level (Moore 2006). Research also shows that larger Länder consistently invest more resources to lobby in Brussels (Grasl 2008, 326). Adopting the so-called Schelling-conjecture5 – which describes the strategic two-level games that governments play in international negotiations by using a domestic parliamentary reserve – to the regional level, our expectation is that regional governments will be interested in strong parliaments in order to strengthen their bargaining position in EU issues vis-à-vis EU institutions, other German Länder or the federal level. Thus, Länder with more weight in the German federal system will be likely to have stronger parliamentary rights in EU affairs.

High economic potential (econ) Finally, we expect the financial strength of German Länder to have explanatory force as well. Albeit the German Constitution prescribes equal living conditions for all citizens independent of their place of residency (Art. 72 Basic Law), important socio-economic differences between the Länder prevail. While one might expect less affluent Länder to have an interest to strengthen parliamentary participation and influence on the EU level because of their reliance on European funding (European Regional Development Fund, European Social Fund), research on multi-level regionalism in the EU suggests that this is not the case (Tatham 2015). The EWS –which is the focus of our investigation – does not deal with subsidies but with legislative proposals. We rather assume that especially Länder with a strong economy will tend to draw their attention to European affairs because the Single Market is an important factor for their economic success. This holds especially true for Länder with export-oriented economies.

Method and operationalization We conduct our analysis using QCA. QCA was developed by Charles Ragin and is often used to analyse medium numbers of cases (Schneider and Wagemann

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2012). The underlying idea behind QCA is to identify explanatory factors for a certain outcome based on an intimate knowledge of the cases. QCA is based on the logic of causal complexity, which expects, among others, that several different combinations can lead to the same outcome. Thus, the method fits well with our analysis of regional variation in Germany, since relevant qualitative case-by-case knowledge is available from our case studies concerning Landtage’s EU scrutiny (Schneider and Wagemann 2012, 12). The aim of QCA is to explain effects (outcomes) through causes (conditions). Two kinds of conditions are here of special interest: Using Boolean algebra, QCA’s aim is to find sufficient and/or necessary conditions. Whenever sufficient conditions are present, a certain outcome will typically occur. Necessary conditions, in contrast, are always at hand when a given outcome is present. In other words, sufficient conditions imply a distinct outcome, whereas necessary conditions are a superset of the outcome. We use fsQCA as it allows coding conditions with anchor points, meaning that the degree of membership in a certain set can differ between full presence, part presence, part absence, or full absence. The researcher’s task is to define a cross-over point that decides whether a case is rather ‘in’ or rather ‘out’ of a given set based on the empirical knowledge of the cases. fsQCA identifies sufficient combinations of conditions using a ‘Truth Table’, which contains all logically possible combinations between them (24 = 16 configurations in our case). Our explanandum – called in QCA parlance ‘outcome’ – is the ‘strong EUscrutiny powers’ of German Landtage,6 as defined and discussed in Section 2 above. The four conditions considered in the analysis of this outcome were laid out in Section 3. Our period of investigation is the inception of new parliamentary rules in German Landtage following the Lisbon Treaty, i.e. the years 2010–2013. This time bracket concerns the outcome, as we expect that the conditions explaining the variance were in place already before and are relatively constant over time. We turn to the operationalization and calibration of the data used. For the condition ‘strong parliamentary rights’ (parlright), we rely on a ranking comparing parliamentary scrutiny at the Länder level (Flick 2008).7 This ranking consists of 10 factors concerning the executive’s dominance of the parliamentary agenda and focuses mainly on minority rights.8 The reason for our choice is that empowering parliamentary minorities leads to an improvement of parliamentary scrutiny because governments have to provide justification for their policies more often. We flip this ranking to reflect more directly our interest in parliamentary rights. Thus, high rankings represent low executive dominance, which, in turn, stands for strong parliamentary rights; low values of executive dominance imply strong parliamentary rights. The condition ‘Strong Partisan Support for Subsidiarity’ (subs) is time invariant and concerns the existence of a conservative governmental majority in the


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given Landtag. In assessing this condition, the time of inception of the new rule is of importance (see Table A2). The ‘Strong federal impact’ (fedimp) condition is operationalized as the voting power of the given Land in the Bundesrat. We use purchasing powers of the Länder as the indicator for economic strength. Our measure for ‘High economic potential’ (econ) is based on the 2012 ranking provided by Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK), a well-established market research company that publishes these data annually. We decided to opt for the data from 2012 because at this point all Landtage have already institutionally reacted to the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty.9 We turn to calibrating the raw data for further processing. Using fsQCA comes with the benefit to differentiate not only between two nominal events (presence or absence) but also more stages which implies that the selected conditions must be calibrated. To define the ‘anchors’’ describing set membership of the cases, good fsQCA practice is to combine theoretical and empirical criteria (Schneider and Wagemann 2012, 32). We opted against using the direct method of calibration which implies that qualitative data are directly transformed into quantitative standards (Schneider and Wagemann 2012). However, this is difficult to implement for our comparison of EU scrutiny of German Landtage. Hence, we use a four-value scheme (0, 0.33, 0.67, and 1), where 0 stands for absence of membership in a set and 1 is full membership. Starting with our outcome ‘Strong EU-Scrutiny’, we regard Landtage with an index score of 2.5 or higher to be members of the set (see Table A1, see also Figure 1). Our index gives all five components equal weight (assessments by the government, access to additional information from the federal government, mandating rights, reports by parliamentary staff, observer in Brussels), with a maximum index score to be reached of 5.0. We decided to do so because our interviews suggested that these are the main factors that contribute to Landtage’s EU capacity. While interviewees emphasized one feature over the other, the overall picture shows that it is not possible to weight the factors differently. We decided to opt for Hesse with a value of 2.5 as the first ‘strong’ case. This corresponds with the assessments of our interviewees describing Hesse’s Landtag as trendsetting parliament, whereas Hamburg, Berlin, Brandenburg, and Saxony-Anhalt (with an index score of 2.0) were mentioned to be passive parliaments. Turning to the explanatory conditions, the fuzzy-sets for ‘parliamentary rights’ are based on the above-mentioned ranking by Flick (2008, Table A2). The values for this condition vary between 2 (North-Rhine Westphalia) and 6 (Schleswig-Holstein). Low scores stand for executive dominance that – in turn – stands for weak parliamentary rights. All cases with a value higher than 4 are defined as being part of the ‘Strong parliamentary rights’ set. For the condition ‘Strong partisan support for subsidiarity’, we use a simple dichotomous scheme. A conservative-led government at the time

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the respective institutional agreement was concluded receives a fuzzy-set score of 1 and its absence 0 (which stands for social-democratic leadership). ‘Strong federal impact’ relies on the institutional weight of the Länder (Table A4). In terms of fsQCA, we decided to rank all Länder with at least four votes in the Bundesrat as ‘strong’ (this includes Länder with more than 3 million inhabitants). Finally, the condition ‘High economic potential’ is based on the respective purchasing power of a Land’s population. This ranges from 16.606 € p.a. in Saxony-Anhalt to 21.985 € p.a. in Hamburg. We defined all cases with a purchasing power higher than 19.000 € as ‘strong’ in economic terms. This implies that Lower Saxony is the first Land to be regarded as rather strong in economic terms, whereas the impoverished former coal-producing region Saarland and the German city-state Bremen remain below the threshold (see Table A3).

Analysis of necessary and sufficient conditions This section presents the results of the analyses of necessity and sufficiency for the outcome ‘EU scrutiny’ and its conditions. Consistency and coverage were calculated using the fsQCA 2.0 software. Additional supporting information are included in Appendix 1 (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Conditions for Landtage with strong EU scrutiny. Source: Own illustration.


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Analysis of necessity In a first step, we identify whether a necessary condition can be found explaining the scrutiny power of Landtage. Necessary conditions imply that whenever the outcome is present, a condition must be present as well. Consistency should therefore exceed 0.9 and coverage should not be below 0.6 for a condition to be considered necessary (Schneider and Wagemann 2012). This is the case for the ‘Strong federal impact’ condition (see Table A6). In other words, in all cases when the outcome (parliamentary scrutiny in EU affairs) is strong (above the 0.5 level), federal impact (vote share in the Bundesrat) is strong as well. This finding supports our expectation that strong parliamentary scrutiny rights in EU affairs are always associated with a strong position in the Bundesrat. In contrast, the Landtage of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saarland, and the two city-states Bremen and Hamburg have weak scrutiny rights in EU affairs.10 In line with our expectation formulated in Section 3, this suggests that multi-level (federal– regional) dynamics play an important role for the empowerment of regional parliaments. While empowering parliaments in EU affairs means giving up some of the autonomy of the government, the danger of losing control remains limited. The fusion between executive and parliamentary majority makes a more proactive role of the Landtage unlikely. Even if this would work, the EWS seems to be regarded as a rather weak tool of influence as it has no binding power (see Section ‘Regional parliaments and the EU’ above for details). In contrast, as the Schelling conjunction in the multilevel governance literature expects, governments might gain in two-level games from this ’paradox of weakness’ as they can credibly show in federal bargaining their manoeuvring space to be limited by domestic institution. ‘Federal impact’ being a necessary condition suggests that these gains are perceived as being high: Eberbach-Born (2013, 304 ff.) and Abels (2017, 171) mention that ‘reasoned opinions’ issued by Landtage are subject to intensive discussions in the second chamber. Taken together, Länder governments seem to use parliamentary reserves as a strategic tool in federal-level bargaining.

Analysis of sufficiency In a second step, we test for sufficient conditions. QCA’s basic innovation is that not only single conditions can be sufficient for an outcome but also combinations of conditions. Thus, different paths can explain the same outcome. The Truth Table shows all possible combinations for the three remaining conditions (Table A5).11 We only present the results of the so-called Complex Solution. As there are no logical remainders, the parsimonious solution is identical.

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The first path leading to strong EU scrutiny is the combination of ‘strong partisan support for subsidiarity’ and weak ‘parliamentary rights’ (see Table 1).12 The path is highly consistent (0.89) and covers Thuringia and Hesse (coverage 0.35). We find support in our interviews for this result. In the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty, when the new institutional agreements were concluded, SPDgoverned Länder agreed to use the EWS only rarely in order to avoid being regarded as EU sceptics. Facing empowered Landtage with additional rights that might use them to issue reasoned opinions would have placed pressure on regional governments and bind administrative resources. This led SPD-led governments to conclude an informal agreement in 2012 to use the EWS only as a legal rather than a political instrument (Interview 7). Länder with conservative governments refused to join this agreement (Interview 7). While this explanatory path explains the case of Thuringia, Saxony is left over as a deviant case. However, our interviews suggest that the Saxon Landtag has continued working on improving its standing: a specialized observer in Brussels has been appointed recently and changes of the institutional agreement between Landtag and government in EU affairs were planned (Interview 8). The second path leading to strong EU scrutiny combines ‘strong economic capacities’ with weak ‘parliamentary rights’.13 This highly consistent combination (1.00) accounts for the Landtage of North-Rhine Westphalia and Hesse. We find, against our expectations that formal parliamentary strength does not lead to strong EU scrutiny power. This negative influence of parliamentary rights seems surprising at first sight. A potential explanation is that EU-related scrutiny demands other factors than those covered by our indicators. Minority rights, for instance, do not necessarily contribute to a better EU scrutiny, which rather demands better information and an increase of parliamentary resources (Winzen 2012). The third path to strong EU scrutiny is given by the combination of the above two solutions: ‘strong partisan support for subsidiarity’ and ‘strong economic capacity’.14 This combination covers Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hesse and has a consistency of 0.83. The solution includes Schleswig-Holstein as well, which is rather weak in EU affairs, but was the

Table 1. Complex Solution for the outcome ‘Strong EU scrutiny powers’. Path subs*∼parlright ∼parlright*econ subs*econ

Cases Thuringia, Hesse, Saxony North-Rhine Westphalia, Hesse Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein

Raw Coverage

Unique Coverage

Consistency

0.35 0.35 0.43

0.17 0.13 0.26

0.89 1.00 0.83

Notes: Solution coverage: 0.74, solution consistency: 0.85. Consistency cut-off: 0.83. *Logical AND (intersection of sets); ∼Logical NO (absence of a condition). Cases in bold type are members of the outcome.


17

Table 2. Complex solution for outcome‘ weak EU scrutiny powers’. Path ∼subs* parlright parlright*∼econ ∼subs*∼econ*∼fedimp*

Cases Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, RhinelandPalatinate, Brandenburg Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Saarland Bremen, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

Raw Coverage

Unique Coverage

Consistency

0.56

0.2

0.78

0.6

0.24

0.94

0.28

0.04

1.0

Notes: Solution coverage: 0.84, solution consistency: 0.81. Consistency cut-off: 0.83. *Logical AND (intersection of sets); ∼Logical NO (absence of a condition). Cases in bold type are members of the outcome.

very Landtag where a new wave of the strengthening parliamentary rights has started in the 1980s following the so-called Barschel-Affair, one of the largest political scandals of post-war Western Germany (Interview 9). Looking more closely to this deviant case shows that Schleswig-Holstein had a conservative-led government when the inter-institutional agreement concerning EU scrutiny of the Landtag was concluded but the seat shares in the grand coalition were almost at equilibrium and even if the government was CDU-led, the Landtag’s formal EU strength remained weak. This is particularly interesting as our interviews indicate that the Landtag of Schleswig-Holstein considers itself as a strong parliament vis-á-vis its government, which is also supported by its parliamentary strength in our index (Interview 9). Following good practice advice in QCA research, we performed the above analysis with the negated outcome as well. For the outcome ‘weak-EU scrutiny’, the sufficiency test for conditions shows the three pathways presented in Table 2. The results lend further credence to our previous findings as all conditions play a role in their negated form as well.

Conclusions Regional parliaments in EU member states with federal political systems have gathered a new momentum following the Lisbon Treaty and so did research concerning their role in the multi-level political system of the EU. Recent studies have looked at how regional parliaments have adapted to the new chances to participate both by using case studies and comparative designs. At the same time, relatively little is known about the factors explaining the differences found between regional parliaments. To address this gap in the literature, we focused on the German case. While previous research underlined that institutional learning takes place among (regional) parliaments in EU affairs (Buzogány 2013; Häsing and Buzogány 2015; Fromage 2017) and stressed the existence of national similarities when comparing regional

18


parliaments in different states (Borońska-Hryniewiecka 2015), our fine-grained institutional analysis of formal scrutiny powers shows that Landtage have installed quite different mechanisms of parliamentary control. Applying insights from configurational causality, we found that influential Länder in the German federal system tend to equip their Landtage with stronger scrutiny rights in EU affairs. This allows them to strengthen their bargaining position vis-á-vis the executive. As governments can usually rely on parliamentary majorities, parliamentary strengthening in EU affairs bears only limited risks for Länder governments. At the same time, opposition parties can benefit from improved access to information rights and are therefore also supportive of stronger scrutiny systems. The analysis of sufficient conditions revealed economic power as well as conservative governments to be important for a strong EU scrutiny of Landtage. As EU legislation has an economic impact on all Länder, especially rich Länder are advantaged by strong parliamentary EU scrutiny instruments as it strengthens their already strong position in the multi-level system. In addition, we found that conservative governments installed stronger EU scrutiny systems, which supports findings on partisan effects found for national parliaments. By contrast, German centre-left governments were hardly interested to improve the EU scrutiny of Landtage. Against expectations in the literature on national parliaments in EU (Raunio 2005), our findings suggest that the strength of parliamentary scrutiny of Landtage unrelated to EU affairs is negatively associated with EU scrutiny. This highlights that EU policies remain still different from ‘normal’ policies and might lead to a differential empowerment of domestic actors. In the cases analysed here, especially Landtage with otherwise weak parliamentary prerogatives were successful in using the reform momentum to strengthen their rights in the field of EU policy. Combined with party political salience of EU integration (which we discussed above referring to parties’ positions towards subsidiarity), the EU integration process has thus differentially empowered weaker Landtage. The cases of Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, and Thuringia, where parliaments have received new, constitutionally controversial mandating rights in order to deal with EU issues, suggest that developments related to EU affairs might spillover to executive–legislative relations in general. Here, our results talk to the ongoing discussions about the potential loss of influence that Landtage have faced for decades (Oberreuter 2010). Neither the German federal government nor regional governments hold vested interests in Landtage to become additional and effective veto players. However, our contribution shows that some Landtage could use the window of opportunity opened up after the Lisbon Treaty more than others. While this does not suggest that regional parliaments will become full-fledged multi-level players anytime soon, we have outlined some factors that might help explain why Landtage are seeking for new roles in Europeanized policy-making.


19

Our findings suggest three avenues for further research. First, both the related literature on national parliaments (Pollak and Slominski 2003; Auel, Rozenberg, and Tacea 2015) and studies of regional parliaments have noted the existing differences between parliament’s formal scrutiny rights and their actual usage of these very rights (Borońska-Hryniewiecka 2017). But we still lack solid knowledge about what explains the actual activities in EU affairs by the Landtage. This could be measured – for instance – by using EWS-related activities of regional parliaments. Our interviews suggest that formal EU scrutiny power and the actual use of reasoned opinions are closely related: The Landtage of Thuringia, Bavaria, and Baden-Württemberg extensively make use of this instrument while others like MecklenburgWestern Pomerania or even North-Rhine Westphalia have not adopted any single reasoned opinion in eight years. A second interesting question worth further attention concerns the impact of parliamentary activism related to the EWS. Do regional parliaments manage to influence the policy process as envisioned by the Lisbon Treaty reforms? As there are no official records kept about interactions of Landtage with Brussels or the Bundesrat – which insists on the strict judicial separation between the regional and the federal level (Abels 2017, 171) – research in this field is more likely to be qualitatively oriented. Our interviews suggest an indirect effect of Landtage’s EWS-related activities in the Bundesrat and in Brussels (Interview 3 and 4), which is understandable given the relatively modest leverage of the EWS, which is not binding on European institutions and needs complex logistical solutions to adopt a reasoned opinion (Högenauer and Abels 2017). Finally, the third obvious avenue for further research would be to compare the legislative powers of regional parliaments in other federal or quasi-federal systems, such as Austria, Belgium, Spain, or Italy (Vandamme 2012; Abels 2017). While Abels (2017) mentions 73 regions in the EU with genuine legislative powers, our research is probably most relevant for a comparison with the Austrian case, both because of similarities in federal relations and the dense networks maintained between German and Austrian Landtage, which are helpful for the diffusion of new ideas. Comparative studies in this field would help to provide a more comprehensive picture of regional executive–legislative relations and federal–regional dynamics in the EU.

Notes 1. See LastG, Lastentragungsgesetz im Bund-Länder-Verhältnis bei der Verletzung supranationaler oder völkerrechtlicher Verpflichtungen. 2. Due to differences in constructing the Index, our measure is not directly comparable to those used in studies of national parliaments.

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3. See http://www.parldok.thueringen.de/ParlDok/dokument/51971/europaparlamentarisch-st%C3%A4rken-zwei-jahre-vereinbarung-%C3%BCber-dieunterrichtung-und-beteiligung-des-landtags-in-angelegenheiten-der-europ% C3%A4ischen-union.pdf (p.9, II, 2b). 4. For detailed information, see Table A1 in Appendix 1. 5. According to Schelling (1960, 22) […] ‘the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself; that, in bargaining, weakness is often strength, freedom may be freedom to capitulate, and to burn bridges behind one may suffice to undo an opponent’. For an application to European multilevel politics, see Finke and Dannwolf (2013). We are not aware of applications to the regional level in an EU context. 6. Note that QCA is built on set-theoretical assumptions. Therefore, the explanandum has to be defined as being included into the set ‘strong EU-scrutiny’. 7. We thank André Kaiser for this suggestion. 8. The score is a combination of 10 different factors: 1. Parliamentary election of all cabinet members. 2. Direct vote of no confidence. 3. No premature end of legislative term by the prime minister’s will. 4. Qualified majority for the extension of the parliamentary agenda. 5. Forwarding of drafts to the committees only after plenary session. 6. No limitation for individual legislative initiatives. 7. Lack of suspensive veto against parliamentary bills. 9. Parliamentary minority’s right to summon members of cabinet to committee sessions. 9. Parliamentary minority’s right to request particular files. 10. A single faction’s right to request judicial review of the compatibility of a law with the constitution. Scores differ from 0 to 1, the presence of a factor leads to high values, which stand for low executive dominance. 9. http://www.bundeslaenderranking.de/i_best_gesamt.html, as accessed on 24 February 2016. 10. Note that this does not imply that all parliaments with at least four votes automatically possess strong EU scrutiny rights. 11. Note: Including the necessary condition ‘Federal impact’ does not increase the solution coverage. Hence, we reduced the model to the three remaining conditions. 12. subs *∼parlright (0.89; 0.35). 13. ∼parlright * econ (1; 0.30). 14. subs * econ (0.83; 0.44).

Acknowledgements Previous versions of the paper were presented at the PADEMIA Workshop organized by Jan Karlas and Viera Knutelská entitled ‘Variation in national parliamentary control and inter-parliamentary cooperation in EU’ at Charles University Prague on April 8, 2016, at the Council of European Studies Annual Conference (2015) in Paris, the UACES 46th Annual Conference in London (2016) as well as the German Politics Colloquium organized by Sabine Kropp at Freie Universität Berlin (2016). For helpful comments, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers as well as Thurid Hustedt, Jan Karlas, Sabine Kropp, Christoph Nguyen, Sho Niikawa, François Randour, and Werner Reutter. Anna Hundehege deserves our gratitude for excellent research support.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.


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Funding Research and travel grants from the German Research Institute for Public Administration in Speyer, the PADEMIA network, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) are gratefully acknowledged.

ORCID Aron Buzogány

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9867-3742

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Appendices Appendix 1 Table A1. Formal strength of Landtage in EU affairs relating to EWS issues. Region

Access to additional information from the federal government

Mandating

Reports by parliamentary staff

0.5 0.5 1 0.5

1 1 0 0.5

1 1 1 0

1 1 0 1

0.5 1 0 0 1 0.5 0 0 0.5 0 0

0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0

0

0

Observer in Brussels

Total

Overall strength

1 0 1 1

4.5 3.5 3 3

High High High High

1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0.5 0

1 0 0 1 1 1 0.5 0 0 0 0

2.5 2 2 2 2 1.5 1.5 1 0.5 0.5 0

High Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Medium Low Low Low Low

0

0

0

Low

Notes: Coding information: The existence of every distinct feature was coded with 1 or 0.5 in case of limitations. A limitation is marked if an assessment by the government is only necessary if it itself decides whether an issue is important or not. This can also apply to the forwarding of federal reports. Since the results differ (from 0 to 4.5), a reasonable classification of formal influence might look as follows: 0 – 1 (low), 1.5 – 2.5 (mean), and 3 – 4.5 (high). Source: Coding based on original documents as well as Abels 2013.


Baden-Württemberg Thuringia Bavaria North-Rhine Westphalia Hesse Hamburg Berlin Brandenburg Saxony-Anhalt Saxony Schleswig-Holstein Bremen Lower Saxony Saarland Mecklenburg-West Pomerania Rhineland-Palatinate

Access to government assessments

25

26


Table A2. Operationalization of causal conditions. Land Baden-Württemberg Bavaria Berlin Brandenburg Bremen Hamburg Hesse Lower Saxony Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania North-Rhine Westphalia Rhineland-Palatinate Saarland Saxony Saxony-Anhalt Schleswig-Holstein Thuringia

parlright

subs

Fedimp

econ

5.5 4 5.5 4.52 5.29 5.52 3 5.31 3.71 2 5.5 4 3.95 4.21 6 3.7

CDU CSU SPD SPD SPD SPD CDU SPD SPD SPD SPD CDU CDU CDU CDU CDU

6 6 4 4 3 3 5 6 3 6 4 3 4 4 4 4

21.411 21.758 18.220 17.816 18.684 21.985 21.488 19.522 16.688 20.132 19.979 18.744 16.768 16.606 20.210 16.795

Table A3. Thresholds for the degree of membership in the conditions and the outcome. Degree of set membership

Score

EU scrutiny

Full membership

1

Strong EU scrutiny

Rather membership than nonmembership

0.67

Rather nonmembership than membership

0.33

>3.0 Rather Strong EU scrutiny 2.5 > 3.0 Rather Weak EU scrutiny 0.5 > 2.5

Full exclusion

0

Weak EU Scrutiny 5 Rather Strong parliamentary rights

CDU or CSUled government 1

Strong federal impact 6 Rather Strong federal impact 4>6

High economic potential >21.000 € Rather High economic potential 19.000 > 21.000 €

5

Rather Low economic potential

4>5 Rather Weak parliamentary rights 3>4

–

Rather Weak federal impact 3–4

Weak parliamentary Rights