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This study focuses on how political institutions--electoral systems and legislative rules, and coalition agreement policy pledges--affect consensus in national parliaments. Two theoretical propositions are established and tested empirically. Proposition 1 contends that consensus will be higher under proportional systems of representation (PR) than under its majoritarian alternatives. Proposition 2 contends that under coalition government, legislative consensus should be higher on legislative motions lacking governing coalition commitment. Proposition 1 is tested with new legislative vote data from New Zealand and Belgium covering those countries' institutional transformations to PR. To test Proposition 2, I focus on periods of coalition government in New Zealand and Belgium after their transition to PR, and in Britain during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. The analysis indicates that New Zealand's electoral system change in the mid-1990s caused a significant increase in consensus, and after reform bills assigned to a select committee chaired by an opposition MP were more likely to result in a bipartisan vote outcome, consistent with Proposition 1. Belgium's institutional transformation from 1893 to 1921 coincided with a decrease in consensus on budgetary legislation. This development suggests that PR will not have a consensus inducing effect in the near-term if the adoption of PR coincides with democratization, though the adoption of PR sets the stage for consensus building over time. Support for Proposition 2 is mixed. In post-reform New Zealand I find that confidence and supply agreements hold those parties to the agreement together when the corresponding bill comes up for a final vote. However, governing coalition commitments are not found to increase consensus in New Zealand. During the Catholic-Liberal coalition government in Belgium from 1921-23, the opposition Socialist Party was significantly more likely to oppose the government on votes approving bills prioritized in the government's post-election declaratory speech, consistent with Proposition 2. During the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in Britain, government policy commitments have a limited effect on vote outcomes. This finding confirms that the effect of coalition agreements on legislative voting in an otherwise majoritarian parliamentary system will be limited.

This dissertation provides a comprehensive account of the role of national parliaments in Europe's post-crisis economic governance. It examines national parliaments in the European Semester, in relation to the European Stability Mechanism and the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance and challenges the view that the Euro crisis has only reduced the influence of national parliaments. The analysis moves beyond prerogatives and institutional capacities to actual parliamentary involvement. Scrutinising the different stages of the European Semester remains a challenge for many national parliaments that have been marginalised by this multilevel coordination and surveillance process. In case of the third rescue package for Greece, the overall involvement by national parliaments exceeded what legal provisions would have demanded. But both economic governance domains suffer from asymmetries between those national parliaments that are willing and able to become actually involved and those that are not. One possible remedy against these asymmetries would be to involve national parliaments into economic governance collectively. The provision of Article 13 TSCG and the Interparliamentary Conference established on this basis, however, fall short of collective involvement or joint scrutiny and the experience of negotiating the institutional design of the new Conference even suggests that any kind of joint parliamentary body for the Euro area would be very difficult to realise. As a general overhaul of the Economic and Monetary Union seems indispensable to make the common currency weather-proof, a more symmetric involvement of national parliaments is necessary to strengthen the legitimacy that they supply. In the European Semester this could be achieved via minimum standards for parliamentary involvement, but the tangled web of procedures for ESM rescue packages is likely to persist and interparliamentary cooperation can only be developed incrementally.

The role of national parliaments in EU matters has become an important subject in the debate over the democratic legitimacy of European Union decision-making. Strengthening parliamentary scrutiny and participation rights at both the domestic and the European level is often seen as an effective measure to address the perceived 'democratic deficit' of the EU – the reason for affording them a prominent place in the newly introduced 'Provisions on Democratic Principles' of the Union (in particular Article 12 TEU). Whether this aim can be met, however, depends crucially on the degree and the manner in which national parliaments actually make use of their institutional rights. This volume therefore aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the activities of national parliaments in the post-Lisbon era. This includes the 'classic' scrutiny of EU legislation, but also parliamentary involvement in EU foreign policy, the use of new parliamentary participation rights of the Lisbon Treaty (Early Warning System), their role regarding the EU's response to the eurozone crisis and the, so far under-researched, role of parliamentary administrators in scrutiny processes. This introduction provides the guiding theoretical framework for the contributions. Based on neo-institutionalist approaches, it discusses institutional capacities and political motivation as the two key explanatory factors in the analysis of parliamentary involvement in EU affairs. (author's abstract)