“The Role of Parliamentary Committees in the Budgetary Process within Europe”

Hallerberg, Mark. (1999) “The Role of Parliamentary Committees in the Budgetary Process within Europe” . In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 1999 (6th), June 2-5, 1999, pages 31, Pittsburgh, PA.

Abstract

Recent theoretical work on the US Congress has focused on two different conceptions of the function of committees. The “distributional” perspective posits that committees are established to guarantee deals made among legislators to distribute spending across different policy areas. The “informational” perspective in contrast contends that committees are designed primarily to provide information to the legislature at large about a bill. Building upon Mattson and Strom (1995), which expands the consideration of these theories to European parliaments, this paper considers why differences across European parliaments exist. It argues that the key difference concerns the regularity of one-party versus multi-party governments. In countries that experience one party governments regularly, weak committees develop that have neither the power to make significant changes to government bills nor to collect information on the compliance of the ministers. In countries where coalition governments are common, however, and, importantly, where fiscal contracts are the norm, committees will be more likely to be strong information providers because they will provide a forum for coalition partners to monitor each other. These patterns are particularly apparent when one examines the budgetary process.