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Catching the Runaway Bureaucracy in Brussels

Euro-Parliamentarians in Budgetary Politics

University of Oxford, UK, hae-won.jun{at}sant.ox.ac.uk

The European Parliament (EP) can act as a democratic check on the European Commission. By relaxing the assumption of the EP as a unitary actor, this article examines factors determining the behaviour of individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in parliamentary scrutiny. It tests propositions based on the costs and benefits of each voting outcome in the context of the four EP roll-call votes cast in the period from 1995 to 2002 on the EP’s decision to grant budgetary discharge to the Commission. The main findings are: (i) ideology matters in the MEPs’ attitude toward the Commission; (ii) national parties influence the MEPs’ behaviour significantly in the discharge votes; and (iii) the ties between the Commissioners and the MEPs through national partisanship influence the MEPs’ attitude to the Commission when it is under threat.

Key Words: budgetary discharge • European Parliament • parliamentary scrutiny • principal-agent models • roll-call vote

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