idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
idw - Informationsdienst
Wissenschaft
Parliaments and Security Policy: Control, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness of Foreign Policy Decisions. Please submit your abstracts until 30 November 2015
The influence of parliaments on the formulation of security policy has found increasing interest in recent research. Importantly, comparative studies showed that consolidated democracies are characterized by substantial variance in the formal-institutional oversight powers of parliaments. While countries like the UK and France grant extensive powers to the executive, other countries, like Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, place military deployments under mandatory parliamentary approval. At the same time, however, research also shows that foreign policy outcomes cannot be attributed to the formal-institutional position of parliament alone. Instead, in order to explain specific policy decisions, additional factors such as party politics and ideology, parliamentary majorities, and public opinion need to be taken into account.
Moreover, whether parliamentary control actually has the intended consequences is contested, not least from the perspective of democratic theory. In practice, even in countries which require parliamentary approval parliament rarely vetoes government decisions. Consensual cross-party decisions, however, make it difficult for voters to attribute decisions to specific political actors. This undermines the “election mechanism” prominent in democratic theory and arguments on the democratic peace. Another strand in the literature focuses on the effects of parliamentary oversight on the conduct of multilateral military operations. These studies show an increased incidence of national caveats through parliamentary oversight, i.e. there tend to be more operational restrictions, which can lead to substantial problems for the effectiveness of multilateral operations.
Parallel to the academic debate, several western democracies witnessed an evaluation and reassessment of the relationship between the executive and parliament in terms of security policy. For instance, in Germany the current Bundestag introduced a commission to reassess parliamentary oversight procedures. In its policy recommendations, the commission suggested several options for reform, some of which would reduce existing oversight powers. In contrast, in Britain a cross-party consensus emerged in support of involving parliament in decisions on war, after the Iraq War was regarded as a failure by wide parts of the political elite and the public at large. Likewise, Spain introduced a parliamentary deployment law as a consequence of the decision to participate in Iraq. Finally, the United States saw several attempts at reforming the War Powers Resolution, which has remained contested among political actors since its introduction in 1973. During the present Congress alone, several reform initiatives were submitted but none of these passed into law.
Against this backdrop, contributions should focus on one or several of the following questions:
(1) What influence does the formal-institutional position of parliament have on the formulation and the output of foreign and security policy?
(2) When are parliamentarians willing to use the instruments at their disposal to influence policy?
(3) Under which conditions does a strengthening or weakening of parliamentary veto and control rights occur?
(4) How are different forms of parliamentary involvement in security policy to be evaluated from the perspective of democratic theory?
If you are interested in contributing to this project, please send your working title, abstract (300-400 words), and a short biographical note to Dr Patrick A. Mello (patrick.mello@tu-dresden.de) and Dr Dirk Peters (peters@hsfk).de by 30 November 2015.
We will notify contributors about our selection of papers by 18 December 2015. An authors' workshop will take place on 22-23 September 2016 at Technische Universität Dresden. Once the workshop agenda has been finalized, we will seek to obtain external funding in order to cover travel and accommodation costs for participants of the workshop in Dresden.
Depending on the contributions received for the workshop, we plan to publish the results either as a special issue of a refereed journal or as an edited volume in the “Edition DVPW-Themengruppe Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik” of the series “Außenpolitik und internationale Ordnung” issued by Nomos, which is also peer reviewed.
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Scientists and scholars, Students
Politics
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