Monitoring subsidiarity in the EU multilevel parliamentary system
Keywords:
national and regional parliaments, principle of subsidiarity, EU legislation, Treaty of Lisbon, Early Warning System, democratic legitimacy, Committee of the RegionsAbstract
The development of the construction of the European Union has introduced new concepts, including multilevel governance, and multilevel parliamentary system. One way to render the European Union more democratic would be the development of a multilevel parliamentary system.
Draft European legislative acts shall be justified with regard to the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality in the EU legislation. Protocol No 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) introduced a mechanism of subsidiarity scrutiny by national parliaments known as ex ante “early warning system”, which increases the involvement of national parliaments in the EU policy-making process.
The study presents the main features of subsidiarity monitoring and how the practice has evolved. Furthermore, it focuses on the two-level structure in the emerging multilevel parliamentary system that is the supranational level, embodied by the European Parliament and the national level, represented by 28 national parliaments. The findings examine a trend towards the extension of the EU multilevel parliamentary field to including EU regional parliaments of the federal and regionalised states, and local and regional bodies of unitary states.
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