Parliaments in International Politics
The contestation of international decision-making is one of the most pressing problems affecting both national institutions and international organizations. As the main arenas of communal decision-making, the involvement of parliaments may be a solution to the legitimacy shortages of international decisions and the institutional paralysis that this may ensue. This dissertation examines two distinct processes that reveal the current place of parliaments in international politics. In the first part of my dissertation, I focus on the role of national parliaments in the politicisation of European integration. Using original data on parliamentary debates and a large corpus of newspaper articles, I show that parliaments are channels for the politicisation of EU decision-making. I find that parliamentary debates on the EU have media attention, especially debates over EU institutions, and that news related to the EU in general are more likely to mention parliament than news unrelated to the EU. In the second part of my dissertation, I study international parliamentary institutions (IPIs). I present the first large n study on the parliamentarization of international organizations (IOs) and propose that IOs utilise IPIs to increase their democratic legitimacy. Specifically, IOs with a region-building objective seek to associate with an institutional design from a more legitimate example: national representative democracy. I support the conclusions of my quantitative analysis with a small n study of the creation of the Andean Parliament. Using original qualitative data, I argue that the transformation of the Andean institutions into a region-building project and the democratic transitions of military regimes at the time were conducive to parliamentarization. My results support the idea that parliaments can help to resolve the inherent tensions between national polities and international decision-making. At the national level, parliaments debating international decisions regain their democratic function of communicating policy alternatives. For IOs, empowerment of existing IPIs following the example of the European Parliament would alleviate the democratic deficit in which they operate.