Studying the influence of national parliaments in EU affairs: reconnecting empirical research and the Principal-Agent approach

ABSTRACT The literature on national parliaments and the EU has built up its knowledge on the strength and activities of domestic parliaments in the European Union. While these studies were of outmost importance to understand how and why parliaments and MPs act on EU affairs, we still know little on the influence of domestic parliaments on the EU policy of their executive and on EU policy-making more generally. The article first presents the current gaps in knowledge as well as the challenges to study the influence of parliaments in EU affairs and ends by presenting a research strategy which advocates ‘reconnecting’ empirical works on national parliaments and the EU with the Principal-Agent model. This research agenda could foster new theoretical and empirical studies with important implications for the debate on the (re)parliamentarisation of the European Union as well as on EU negotiations.