Effectiveness of the European Semester: explaining domestic consent and contestation

Do parliamentary parties politicize compliance within the European Semester? If so, which conflict lines organize parliamentary debates? In order to address these questions, this discussion paper analyses national parliamentary participation in two budgetary cycles of the European Semester (2014 and 2015) in Austria, France, Germany, and Ireland. While in France and Germany, compliance within the European Semester has been subject to strong politicization, this has not been the case in Austria and Ireland. Moreover, strong politicization coincided with the contestation of country-specific recommendations among the parliamentary parties. The empirical analysis established that strong formal powers in budgetary matters constitute an important prerequisite allowing parliamentary parties to articulate their contestation. However, the willingness to comply depends most directly on whether the content of country-specific recommendations is coherent with the economic preferences of a political party, not the government-opposition cleavage.