Paper Titles & Abstracts

Using a principal-agent perspective completed by sociological institutionalism (Shapiro, 2005), this paper aims at evaluating the autonomy of governments from federal and regionalized states) in the Council of the European Union vis-à-vis their domestic parliament(s). This paper will propose preliminary results regarding the case of Belgium focusing on the environment sector, a competence mostly regionalized in Belgium. Indeed, the specific case of federal and regionalized States is interesting since it implies that an agent (the Belgian representatives) faces several potential principals (national and regional parliaments). This questions how these governments deal with their national win-set, given the fact that they also have to negotiate with the other member states in the Council. This research focuses more particularly on the relation between the Belgian representatives in the Council of the EU, and the parliament(s) from the federal and subnational level. Most of the time, this relationship is analyzed as a bottom-up process, focusing on the control mechanisms available to the principals (scrutiny by the parliaments). As a consequence, few articles concentrate specifically on the agent actions. Delreux and Kerremans (2010) have shown that in some cases, the agent is able to mitigate the controls of principals when negotiating at the international level. This leaves several questions open: How does the agent deal with his autonomy? Is he able to transmit pressure coming from the European level to principal(s) at domestic level? In other words, the research questions how the government deals with its national win-set and how much autonomy they enjoy. Answering these questions would help gaining insights on the Council functioning, and would contribute to the understanding of the roles of parliaments in the European Union.