The Bundestag: Institutional Incrementalism and Behavioural Reticence

The article addresses an important paradox in the parliamentary scrutiny of EU legislation in Germany: On the one hand, there is a very broad elite consensus about the importance of European legislation and about the need to ensure proper democratic accountability in the EU. On the other hand, there is a distinctive disinterest in EU legislation in the German Bundestag. Apart from major treaty revisions, Members of the German Bundestag do not invest scarce resources (time and political capital, in particular) to deal with EU policy. In the article I develop a simple but innovative expected-utility model, use comparative statics to simulate the strength of various incentives faced by rational actors dealing with EU legislation and provide some empirical evidence in support the main thesis of this article: The interest in parliamentary scrutiny of EU legislation is low, because its electoral salience is low. In my view the argument as such is not original, but the way it is formally presented is original, better suited to inspire comparative theory-building and more rigorous than in any other publication on this issue I am aware of.