Banking on meps? The Strategic and Partisan Motivations for the Parliamentary Scrutiny of the European Central Bank

What is it about?

In the aftermath of the recent economic and financial crises, the European Central Bank (ECB), a fully independent body since its creation, has been endowed with additional powers, thus generating new concerns about its accountability. Against this backdrop, this article investigates the day-to-day interactions between the European Parliament (EP) - that is the only directly elected EU institution -, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ECB as well as other major EU institutions._x000D_ Focusing specifically on parliamentary questions, the article analyses the ways in which the EP scrutinises the ECB and MEPs adjust to its altered role, standing, and function. It seeks to establish what motivates MEPs’ questioning activity in the monetary and financial fields._x000D_ Relying on a new dataset, we evidence that MEPs generally take their function of scrutiny and control seriously, as more and more questions originate from the EP. Regarding the monetary and financial policies, MEPs are more inclined to scrutinize the ECB’s activities when these policies are high on the public agenda._x000D_ At the individual level, questions to the ECB do have a ‘signalling’ function for MEPs from the countries that were the most severely affected by the sovereign debt crisis. The analysis of parliamentary questions finally suggests that there is a politicisation of parliamentary scrutiny, in so far as MEPs from Eurosceptic parties (and from the smallest groups) tend to ask more questions than their colleagues.

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