‘Servants of the People’ or ‘Master

‘Servants of the People’ or ‘Masters of the Government’?
Explaining Parliamentary Behaviour in EU Affairs
Katrin Auel
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
katrin.auel@politics.ox.ac.uk
Paper for presentation at the
11th Biennial Conference of the European Union Studies Association
Los Angeles, April 23-25, 2009
‘Servants of the People’ or ‘Masters of the Government’?
Explaining Parliamentary Behaviour in EU Affairs
Katrin Auel, University of Oxford
March 2009
Abstract
Comparative studies using a rational choice approach have successfully explained variation
in the degree of institutional parliamentary strength in EU affairs, but they perform less
well with regard to explaining both actual parliamentary behaviour and variation thereof.
The paper therefore develops an explanation for parliamentary behaviour based on agency
theory and the model of delegation. The aim is to enrich rational choice approaches, which
have so far focused mainly on the preference of re-election and have therefore - at least
implicitly - conceptualised parliamentarians as agents of their voters or parties. In
parliamentary systems, however, MPs are not only agents of the voters (or parties), but also
principals of the government. The paper is based on Strøm’s rational choice institutionalist
conception of parliamentary roles as ‘routines, driven by reasons (preferences), and
constrained by rules’ (Strøm 1997: 158), but uses Merton’s concept of ‘role-sets’ (Merton
1957) to analyse parliamentary agent- and principal-relationships as different elements of
the role-set ‘MP’ associated with specific routines driven by specific preferences.
Introduction
Since the early 1990s the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union (EU) has developed
into one of the major and most debated topics in European politics. Within this debate, the
role of national parliaments has generated a considerable body of literature. Much of the early
literature consisted of informative, but often descriptive, accounts of the institutional
adaptation of national parliaments to the challenges of integration, detailing institutional
provisions and scrutiny procedures. However, the last years have also seen a growing number
of comparative studies and theoretical contributions that aim at classifying national
parliaments according to their institutional position in European affairs (e.g. Bergman 2000a;
Maurer 2001), and at explaining institutional variation (Raunio 2005; Saalfeld 2005). The
latter have explained variation in the degree of institutional parliamentary strength in EU
affairs with two main variables, the power of parliament independent of European integration
and the electoral salience of / public opinion on European integration. However, while these
studies convincingly assess and explain institutional variation, they perform less well with
regard to actual parliamentary behaviour. First, they focus only on formal parliamentary
rights of influence and are thus based on the debatable assumption that institutional
capabilities equal parliamentary behaviour. Yet as studies have shown, national parliaments
often make little use of their institutional rights (e.g. Auel 2006, Pollack and Slominski 2003),
in other words, what parliaments can do is not necessarily what they actually do in reality.
Second, based on the - implicit or explicit - assumption that the reluctant use of institutional
rights is a sign of ‘behavioural reticence’ (Saalfeld 2003) they tend to ignore the possibility
that national parliaments have found other means to get involved in EU affairs. Indeed, while
some parliaments focus on informally influencing the position of the government for Council
negotiations, others concentrate on holding the government publicly to account for their EU
policies (Auel and Benz 2005). As a result, they are also unable to explain parliamentary
behaviour that seems counter-productive from a rational point of view, such as costly,
because time consuming, activities in EU affairs that take place behind closed doors and will
thus have few direct electoral benefits for the MPs involved. Auel and Benz (2005), in
contrast, do compare parliamentary behaviour in terms of both, the use of institutional rights
and the development of more informal strategies of parliamentary involvement in EU affairs
across a small number of parliaments. However, while they can explain the reasons for the
development of such alternative strategies they fail to provide a more general explanation for
the variation in parliamentary behaviour they observe.
The paper therefore develops an explanation for parliamentary behaviour based on
integrating the idea of parliamentary roles and the principal-agent model. As Wahlke and his
associates (1962: 9) famously argued, ‘the chief utility of the role theory model of legislative
behavior is that, unlike other models, it pinpoints those aspects of legislators’ behavior which
make the legislature an institution’. The aim is to enrich rational choice conceptions of
legislative behaviour which have so far mainly focused on the preference of re-election and
thus - implicitly - on the role of legislators as the agent of their party or voters. The main
argument is that MPs in parliamentary systems are not only agents, but also principals of the
government and that any analysis of parliamentary behaviour needs to take their preferences
as principals into account.
The paper proceeds in six sections. The first section gives a short overview over the
rational choice literature in legislative behaviour with a particular focus on Strøm’s (1997)
rational choice neo-institutionalist conception of parliamentary roles and introduces the role
of MPs as principals of the government. Section 2 uses Merton’s concept of ‘role-sets’
(Merton 1957) to discuss the three main agent- and principal-relationships associated with the
status of MP. Using agency theory, it will argue that the roles of agent of the voters, agent of
the party and principal of the government are, in turn, associated with specific preferences: As
agents, MPs’ most important preference is to secure their re-authorisation, i.e. to be reselected/re-nominated
as the agent of their party and to be re-elected by the voters. As
principals, the most important preference is to induce their agent (the government) to act in
accordance with their interests, i.e. to minimise agency loss. Section 4 discusses
parliamentary strategies MPs can use to pursue their preferences as both agents and principals
in general. Based on the assumption that MPs preferences are hierarchically ordered, with the
preference of re-authorisation as agent being more important, it will be argued that in their
role as principals MPs will choose strategies of minimising agency loss that will advance, or
at least not hurt, the realisation of their preferences as agents. Section 5 then turns to the field
of European affairs and looks in more detail at the strategies MPs can employ to minimise
agency loss. It argues that the that the choice of strategies depends on their payoff in terms of
reducing agency loss relative to their costs and discusses specific institutional incentives and
constraints that will have an impact on both. Section six draws the arguments together,
provides some empirical illustrations and concludes.
Explaining Legislative Behaviour: Rational Choice and Legislative Roles
Rational choice approaches to legislative behaviour have long been reluctant to develop
specific conceptions of legislative roles or to even use the term. Rather, rational choice
approaches have sought to explain legislative behaviour with economic models of individual
behaviour models stressing individual preferences and strategic choices (e.g., Fenno 1973;
Mayhew 1974; Shepsle 1978; Smith and Deering 1984).1
Rational choice neo-institutionalism
has expanded the perspective and paid attention to the constraining impact of institutions and
formal rules as ‘the strategic context in which optimizing behaviour takes place’ (Shepsle
1989: 35, see also for example Laver and Shepsle 1996, Huber 1996a). Theorists increasingly
understood that ‘formal models can best advance our understanding of legislatures when they
are enriched by with institutional detail’ (Shepsle and Weingast 1994: 145).
Much of literature on legislative behaviour has been developed through analysis based on
the United States Congress (but see Doering 1995) and focuses on career goals of legislators
to explain behaviour. In one of the earliest and most influential contributions, Mayhews
argued that legislative behaviour could be best understood if legislators were see as ‘singleminded
seekers of reelection’ (Mayhews 1974: 5), re-election being the preference that
‘underlies everything else, as indeed it should if we are to expect that the relations between
politicians and public will be one of accountability’ (ibid.: 16-7). Although later works have
presented a more nuanced perspective on legislators’ preferences, the re-election or career
goal remained prominent in the literature (Katznelson and Weingast 2005: 8). Schlesinger, for
example, defined the main preference of legislators by the broader term of ‘political ambition’
(Schlesinger 1991: 39f.) and distinguished between discrete ambition (the aim to gain a
specific office for one term), static ambition (to keep the office for several terms) and
progressive ambition (to gain a more powerful office). In contrast, Fenno (1973) in his
seminal work on Congress Committees, broadened the narrow focus on re-election and
included ‘influence within the House’ and ‘good public policy’ as two further basic
preferences or goals of Members of Congress. But in his later work, he still argued that
legislators ‘want to get nominated and elected, then renominated and re-elected. For most
members of Congress most of the time, this electoral goal is primary (Fenno 1977: 889).