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Citizen-centred or state-centred? The representational design of International Parliamentary Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2020

Thomas Winzen
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom
Jofre Rocabert*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Abstract

As a result of the spread of International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs), international organisations face crucial questions of representational design. We introduce a distinction between citizen-centred and state-centred IPIs in international organisations (IO). Drawing on original data, we show that, even though parliaments might seem likely to foster citizen representation in the international realm, they in fact often follow state-centred representational designs. We further find that citizen-centred IPIs are a near exclusive phenomenon of a few, democratic regional integration projects. Given the prevalence of state-centred representational designs, we conclude that IPIs’ potential to represent different cross-border communities, concerns, and conflict lines than intergovernmental IO bodies remains institutionally limited. IPIs are thus unlikely to challenge these bodies in similar ways as often observed in the relationship between the European Parliament and the European Union's Council of Ministers.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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73 As noted earlier, for this reason some scholars might prefer to refer to the IPIs in our study as international parliamentary organs to underline their affiliation to an IO, but the more widely known term, IPI, while being more general, remains accurate nonetheless.

74 The IPI of the Eurasian Economic Community was dissolved in 2014, bringing down the number of existing IPIs.

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102 The scale of the decision-making authority index is: (0) no formal rights; (1) information about IO agenda; (2) obligatory consultation; (3) right to a response to consultation; (4) veto rights; (5) exclusive IPI decision. In the appendix we provide further detail on this indicator.

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113 Senado Federal do Brasil, ‘Reativado Parlamento Amazônico para evitar desmatamentos e queimadas’, TV Senado (21 February 2020), available at: {https://www12.senado.leg.br/tv/programas/argumento/2020/02/reativado-parlamento-amazonico-para-evitar-desmatamentos-e-queimadas}accessed 21 September 2020.

114 Marshall, Polity V Project.

115 Michael Coppedge et al., ‘V-Dem [Country–Year/ Country/Date] Dataset v10’.