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The Review of International Organizations

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30-05-2018

Why national parliamentarians join international organizations

Author: Thomas Malang

Published in: The Review of International Organizations | Issue 3/2019

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Abstract

It is customary to argue that international organizations (IOs) are very much dominated by national executives, with national parliaments wielding no or at best marginal influence. According to this accepted wisdom, there cannot be many reasons for national parliaments and their members to be active within IOs. However, we can observe a movement towards the parliamentarization of IOs, materialized in a growing number of parliamentary bodies with increasing competencies that accompany governmental actions and decisions. My paper wants to shed light on the underlying incentive for members of national parliaments (MPs) to engage in these international parliamentary assemblies (IPAs). Proceeding from the assumption that IPAs can enable parliamentarians to fulfil their representation and control function, I argue that (1) district level factors related to internationalization can explain why some MPs become members of IPAs, and (2) opposition parties can use the information generated in IPAs to control governmental activities in International Organizations. I test the claims with data of all parliamentarians of the recent legislative period of the German Bundestag and personal interviews with 10 IPA members. The results suggest that especially district incentives are positive predictors for membership in the different assemblies, whereas variance in membership can hardly be explained by party-level factors.

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The main exceptions that research on international parliamentary institutions are Cofelice (2012); Costa et al. (2013); Cutler (2001); Habegger (2010); Kissling (2011); Kraft-Kasack (2008); Marschall (2005); Šabič (2008a, 2013); Wagner (2013).

Compared to civil society and business actors that only articulate their interests, parliamentary bodies could have the democratic function of aggregating interests in international organizations.

An encompassing overview of all kinds of interparliamentary institutions and their legal status delivers Kissling (2011) and Rocabert et al. (2014). Discussions about terminology can be found in Šabič (2008a).

The Bundestag sends members to all IPAs where it got invited, except for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, an equivalent IPA to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean (PA-UfM). Whereas the latter was established on the basis of the Barcelona process between the EU and the neighboring states, the former was created independently. Germany was invited, but the heads of the factions decided in accordance with the secretariat not to join this delegation.

However, on the level of the political system, parties in parliamentary systems have more incentives to contribute to public goods than parties in majoritarian systems, (Persson et al. 2000) due to a lower degree of separation of powers and a higher level of legislative cohesion.

Representing citizens works best when there are free elections where candidates compete for votes and have the possibility to freely state and represent their (or their electorates) interests. Controlling governments works only under a classical principal-agent relationship, where the parliament as the principal tries to control the behavior of its agent, the government. In non-democratic system, this relationship is reversed: The government is the principal and parliament only its agent (Malang 2018). Without digging too much into the nuances of the democratic-autocratic divide, I assume that my argument about control and representation works only for liberal democracies, where parliament is the principal. I will come to the incentives for autocracies to join IPAs in the section on future research.

Thus, we are touching upon the discussion if IPAs really fulfil parliamentary functions on an international level – like the functional definitions of IPIs by Šabič (2008a) – only indirectly by an investigation of national MP choices.

A procedure that was criticized recently as non-transparent in the wake of the allegations of corruption within the PACE in relation to election observation missions in Azerbaijan under the title “caviar diplomacy.”

CDU/CSU, Die LINKE, and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen

MP Fischer (CDU) and MP Lamers (CDU)

Quote from the answer of the CDU/CSU faction, own translation.

This is the same procedure as that of committee allocation in the Bundestag, recently described by Mickler (2018) and internally referred to as the “carpet dealer convention” (Teppichhändlerrunde). In line with Mickler, I see no big problem, and no other possibility, as to treat the realizations of IPA membership as independent.

Specifying a non-nested hierarchical model on the party and Bundesland only added complexity and was not further utilized.

There are 33 more list candidates then district MPs because if a party wins more direct seats than it is entitled under proportional representation, it retains these “excess seats”.

The committees are: Foreign Affairs, EU, Human Rights, Defense, Economic Cooperation and Development.

One issue that regularly raises concern, e.g., when confronted with non-findings from theoretically relevant variables, is multicollinearity. In the presence of multicollinearity, coefficients may have the wrong sign or lower / higher than predicted magnitudes. However, as multicollinearity does not affect the overall results and as share of foreigners and unemployment rate are assumed to be theoretically relevant for the explanation of IPA participation, both variables are included in subsequent models. Also, urban district and unemployment correlate with .41, unemployment and share of foreigners with −.03, and foreigners and the town dummy with .61. So I see no problem here.

Except the heads of the IPAs, mainly because of the strategic reason that I wanted to prevent a central framing of the interviews. The heads should not use their position to influence all the members.

Additionally, I contacted the offices of the political factions and the administrative unit in charge of the IPAs in the German Bundestag to increase the validity of our findings by different information sources.

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Title: Why national parliamentarians join international organizations
Author: Thomas Malang
Publication date: 30-05-2018
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: The Review of International Organizations / Issue 3/2019
Print ISSN: 1559-7431
Electronic ISSN: 1559-744X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-018-9314-7

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