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Parliamentary oversight under the Covid-19 emergency: striving against executive dominance

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 emergency has profoundly challenged the interactions between the legislative and the executive branches of government: while executives have assumed a predominant role in law-making, parliaments are being increasingly marginalised. In the circumstances, many factors make parliamentary oversight of the executive a strategic function for the democratic legitimacy of policy-making. Evaluating the role of parliaments in this domain is the main purpose of this article. It traces and assesses oversight initiatives started by parliaments in Europe in order to evaluate: what types of interaction they are developing with the executives; whether the oversight procedures have been changed, either in a temporary or permanent way; and what sort of influence the oversight function has had on the final outcome of decision-making. The comparative analysis demonstrates that parliaments have followed a realistic and incremental approach to ensure continuity of executive oversight, prioritising the mechanisms that they deemed to be strategic and also feasible in terms of logistical arrangements. Drawing on the lessons learned from this experience, it is questioned whether some of the new oversight (digital) practices should be made permanent. It is argued that prospectively an appropriate and full use of oversight prerogatives will be the marker of parliaments’ ability to create opportunity out of the crisis.