Investigation of scrutiny of EU legislation, case study of Belgium and the Netherlands

Abstract

Current thesis will be investigating the different ways of scrutinising European Union legislation in the member states. Belgium and the Netherlands have been chosen to be the comparative cases in the current study in order to show the different outcomes of countries with similar background. The research asks what are the main ways of member states to become closely involved in EU affairs and what motivates the parliaments to get actively engaged. Theories on the scrutiny of EU legislation provide plenty of relevant reasons for close cooperation between the EU and member states. Belgium and the Netherlands have very different scrutiny mechanisms and the outcome also varies, with Belgian parliament always scoring lower than the Dutch one. Investigating the two cases brings out that the reasoning for countries is always individual and there is no universal way to evaluate the member states all together.