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As the most powerful executive actor in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the Eurogroup has faced continuous demands to improve its accountability record since the euro crisis. One reform introduced to meet these demands were the Economic Dialogue – a regular exchange of views between the European Parliament and the President of the Eurogroup designed to ‘ensure greater transparency and accountability’ in the EMU. This chapter investigates the practical functioning of the Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup between 2013 and the 2019 European Parliament elections. Applying the theoretical framework of the introduction, the purpose is to examine the extent to which the Parliament focuses on procedural or substantive accountability when questioning the Eurogroup President. Moreover, the chapter investigates the reasoning of parliamentary questions in line with the four accountability goods identified at the outset (openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness). The findings show that Members of the European Parliament are eager to question the extent to which Eurogroup decisions are substantively open and effective, and to a lesser extent whether they are arbitrary or protect EU interests more generally. The analysis is based on fourteen transcripts of Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup President, which took place between 2013 and 2019.
This chapter provides the volumes general conceptual framework. It begins by addressing why new approaches to accountability are needed, arguing that accountability literature has reached a stalemate as a result of an impasse between deductive and inductive approaches to accountability in the EU. It then argues that overcoming the stalemate requires developing a generalised framework of what accountability is for, deriving four accountability goods to be used in subsequent chapters. The chapter argues that each of the goods can be delivered in procedural or substantive ways, focusing either on the process by which decisions are made or the substantive worth of decisions themselves. The chapter concludes by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both varieties of accountability before mapping out how the concepts will be applied across policy fields and institutions in subsequent chapters.
The European Parliament as an Accountability Forum: Overseeing the Economic and Monetary Union
(2022)
This book provides the first in-depth empirical study of the European Parliament’s powers of scrutiny of the executive in the European Union (EU), focusing on the politically salient field of the Economic and Monetary Union. The expansion of executive decision-making during the euro crisis was accompanied by an empowerment of the European Parliament through legislative oversight. This book examines how the European Parliament exercises that oversight on a day-to-day basis and thus contributes to political accountability at the EU level. Building on an innovative analytical framework for the study of parliamentary questions and answers, Adina Akbik sheds light on the European Parliament’s possibilities and limitations to hold EU executive bodies accountable more generally. Case studies cover the period 2012–2019 and include the European Central Bank in banking supervision, the European Commission, the Eurogroup, and the Economic and Financial Affairs Council.