The Effectiveness of Oversight in the European Union in Euroskeptic Times

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Amidst growing skepticism of the European project and increasing polarization between European actors, the role of monitoring, oversight, and sanctioning is of increasing importance. Oversight has become a salient political issue for ordinary voters over the past ten years. European oversight has been challenged by populist and euroskeptic actors, who see ‘Brusselsization’ as reducing sovereignty in domestic decision-making, judicial independence, and monetary and fiscal policy. Political parties across Europe have explicitly responded to this oversight role of the European Union, even as the EU itself has attempted to make its oversight more open and more democratic through a variety of means.

The papers in this panel offer different, innovative approaches to assessing the contemporary role of European Union oversight, monitoring, and sanctioning in the context of rising populism, anti-European sentiment, and other challenges to European governance. Each, specifically, looks at the effectiveness of a major oversight mechanism. Conant addresses the ways that European oversight, provided by the European Court of Justice, breaks down when Europeanization has expanded beyond legal texts and in member states with little respect for the rule of law. Fjelstul uses a formal model to examine the effectiveness of constitutional courts to deter legal noncompliance within the European Union. Epstein and Rhodes examine the oversight provided by the European Central Bank and the effectiveness of Banking Union in ensuring compliance. Stenberg analyzes regional variation in the use of parliamentary questions by individual Members of the European Parliament using topic modeling, quantitative text analysis, and natural language processing. The papers in this panel focus on a range of relevant actors providing European oversight, including formal EU institutions, individual European actors, and constitutional courts, each of which contends with the responsibilities and effects of European authority in different ways, impacting policy-making across a wide range of domains. Lastly, the papers in this panel represent a broad range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods techniques.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 15: European Politics and Society

Chair

• Tanja A. Boerzel Freie Universität Berlin

Discussant

• Lisa Conant University of Denver

Individual Presentations

• Europe’s New Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) and Banking Union - Rachel Epstein, University of Denver; Martin J. Rhodes, University of Denver

• Policy Implementation, Noncompliance, and the Impact of Constitutional Courts - Joshua Camden Fjelstul, Emory University

• Regional Variation in the European Parliament—The Use of Parliamentary Questions - Matthew Stenberg, University of California, Berkeley