By Mette Marie Staehr Harder and Hallbera West
Controlling the government is a key task of any democratic country’s parliament. One widely used legislative control tool is parliamentary questions which are typically used by members of the opposition. In the Faroe Islands and Greenland, as in most parliamentary settings, members of the national parliaments; the Løgting and Inatsisartut, may pose questions to their national government, thus controlling their government. However, more atypically, the two Faroese MPs as well as the two Greenlandic MPs who are elected to the Danish parliament, the Folketing have an alternative arena for control of their government at home. Hence, in theory, these four North Atlantic members of the Danish Folketing may also pose parliamentary questions to the Danish government concerning the actions or inactions of their home-rule government. If applied this way, the Folketing could act as an alternative arena for control of the national periphery government, and we would be witnessing an example of what we term cross-parliamentary control.
Questions and Data
Thus far, this type of control in which representatives use the control tool of another country’s parliament to control their home government has not yet been an issue of much attention in the legislative literature. Yet, as the influence of national parliaments vs. governments is challenged due to processes of globalization, international collaboration, and specialization of the executive branch among others, the need to understand parliamentary control and thus the quality of democracy through unorthodox perspectives of multilevel governance grows increasingly important. Therefore, we set out to study the following research question:
In addition, if such cross-parliamentary control exists we ask:
To answer these questions, we study a newly collected dataset consisting of parliamentary questions posed by North Atlantic members of the Danish parliament to Danish ministers in a period of 15-years (2005-2020). As the literature quite concordantly states that mostly parliamentarians in opposition make use of tools for control, we exclusively study the questions posed by North Atlantic MPs who represent political parties that are in opposition at home(N=869). As such, our data is selected from the premise that it is within this data, we are most likely to find examples of cross-parliamentary control.
Importance of cross-parliamentary control
In providing a theoretical possibility for conducting cross-parliamentary control, the case of the Danish Realm is a seldom case – yet it is not unique. Hence, other parliaments – e.g. the French parliament as well as Westminster—may provide similar opportunities for members elected in districts with different levels of national self-government.
The perspectives on cross-parliamentary control offered by the Danish case have importance beyond the similar cases: Empirically, it is not a new observation that the power of parliaments vs. the executive power is challenged due to processes of globalization, international collaboration, and specialization of the executive branch. Also, research shows that parliaments are finding ways to take back power (Raunio 2014; Martin & Vanberg 2011; Bergman & Strøm 2011: 14-16; Saalfeld 2000; Judge 1995, 8; Norton 1990, 3–4). Yet, the appliance of cross-parliamentary institutions for control as a means which strengthens parliamentary control of the government has not been an object of much scholarly consideration. Rather, instead of cross-parliamentary foci, scholars have studied ways in which international collaboration among parliaments remedy national parliaments’ loss of power. For example, the occurrence of this within international inter-parliamentary institutions (IPIs) has spurred much recent scholarly interest (Cofelice, 2018; Costa, 2016; Costa et al., 2013; Flockhart, 2004). In turn, scholars have stressed the importance of not overlooking the role played by national parliaments in international politics, diplomacy and sub-state units para diplomacy though this is normally thought of as an area of the executives (e.g. Ackrén 2014, Malamud and Stavridis 2011; Pintz 2019; Sabic 2008). Our study contributes to the field of legislative oversight by studying this phenomena from a perspective of multi-level governance rather than the conventional national –or the more recent—inter-parliamentary contexts.
Results
Corresponding to our expectations, our analyses show that most of the questions posed by the North Atlantic members of the Danish parliament, who are in opposition at home, concern the actions or inactions of the Danish government. Nevertheless, 7.8 pct. of these questions concern the actions or inactions of the members’ home government. Hence, they enact cross-parliamentary control: either as direct control in the short run or as a more indirect, long-run control which create a sense of being potentially controlled from abroad (for this “long-run” sense of being potentially controlled we find inspiration in Bentham’s Panopticon as described by Foucault).
Moreover, in line with our initial expectations, which are based on the former findings of Harder and West (Harder 2021; West 2019), we find that Greenlandic MPs make use of this possibility to a much larger extent than the Faroese members do. However, contrary to our expectations, it is the members from the parties that are most critical towards the Danish Realm, which makes the most use of the opportunity to gain information on the actions of their home-governments from the Danish Authorities. Especially, this tendency is particularly strong for Faroese members. We believe this to be a sign that partisan motives at home are more important to North Atlantic politicians in the Danish parliament than we initially expected them to be.
Finally, and in line with our expectations, most of the questions posed are questions that ask for information regarding the actions or inactions of the government at home. Though we assume that these questions primarily have the effect of creating an awareness of potential control at home as well as providing MPs with concrete information, if picked up by the media at home, some of these questions will quite surely also have partisan effects at home.
In conclusion, the theoretical possibility of cross-national control turns out to be used by the MPs elected in the North Atlantic peripheries. This type of control has not yet been described in the legislative literature. Moreover, it is not described as a possibility within the few formal institutions that guide the North Atlantic behavior within the Danish parliament (The Danish Constitution most notably). Nor does it seem to have been anticipated among the institutional designers when the North Atlantic representation in the Danish parliament was last adjusted (in the early 1950s). Nevertheless, through their practical representative behavior, North Atlantic MPs have innovated this tool to control their home government – a tool which may even be extra powerful because a foreign government is involved.
Authors
Mette Marie Staehr Harder, senior lecturer in Political Science, Karlstad University, Sweden and visiting fellow at the Department of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. mm.harder@jur.ku.dk
Hallbera West, assistant professor in Political Science, University of the Faroes Islands and program leader of West Nordic Studies. hallberaw@setur.fo