Political Accountability in Europe: Which Way Forward?: A Traditional Concept of Parliamentary Democracy in an EU Context

There seems to be a growing tendency, as prominently shown by the fall of the Santer Commission in 1999 and expressed more recently in the Constitutional Treaty, to construe the relationship between the Commission and the European Parliament as a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system the government gives account of its action to Parliament and, where appropriate, suffers the consequences, takes the blame or undertakes to put matters right if it should appear that errors have been made. The government remains in office as long as it has the confidence of the majority in Parliament and until Parliament votes a motion of censure or the government resigns.The aim of this subproject is to further develop a European concept of political accountability. The basic assumption of the project is that such a concept must be firmly rooted in the longstanding constitutional traditions of the Member States. From this perspective it is relevant to try to identify what political accountability precisely means in the various Member States. This proves to be far from evident. The concept of political accountability substantially differs from country to country. For example political accountability in Italy and France primarily seems to focus on resignation of ministers whereas political accountability in for example the United Kingdom or the Netherlands aims at the process of giving account.In order to analyse the various approaches and to try to identify common principles (ius commune), twelve distinguished constitutional lawyers and political scientists have analysed the concept of political accountability from their national perspectives. In a final comparative chapter is tried to identify the parallels and the differences between the national systems and to explore to what extent common ground can be found in Europe. In this chapter is also tried to analyze to what extent this ‘ius commune’ can be applied to the EU-level.