Parliamentary Questions, Oversight, and National Opposition Status in the European Parliament

This study examines when and why members of the European Parliament (EP) use parliamentary questions as a form of fire alarm oversight. We argue that the multilevel nature of the EU political system allows members of the EP from national opposition parties to use parliamentary questions to alert the European Commission to governments’ failures to implement EU policy. Representation in the EP provides the only avenue for such oversight for national opposition parties. Using a new sample of EP parliamentary questions, we demonstrate that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to alert the Commission to violations of EU law in their own member states. These parliamentary questions may lead the Commission to take legal action against member-state governments. Most parliaments allow members to ask questions of the executive branch to keep tabs on its activities. Despite this ubiquitous feature of parliamentarypolitics,therehasbeenlittleresearchonwhenandwhyMPs employ questions to monitor the implementation of legislation by the executive branch and even less work exploring the interaction between different levels of government and the opportunity for parliamentary oversight. This article argues that a party’s national governmentopposition status affects the number and nature of questions its members in the supranational European Parliament (MEPs) ask of the European Commission, the European Union’s (EU) executive branch and guardian oftheEU’streaties.BecausetheEUhasverylittleadministrativecapacity of its own, the member-state governments act as the EU’s agents for the purposes of implementing EU policy. The Commission monitors member-state implementation but frequently depends on outside parties to alert them to problems. In this institutional context, MEP questions are bs_bs_banner