OVERSIGHT

A total of 15 permanent special parliamentary committees and the Grand Committee prepare government bills, legislative initiatives, government reports and other matters for handling in plenary session. Reforms of the committee system in the early 1990s aimed at achieving a better fit between the task areas of parliamentary committees and ministries. Today the fit is almost perfect, with committees thematically bound within the scope of a corresponding ministry. The Grand Committee is in practice a committee mainly for the handling of EU-related matters.

There is a close congruence between the areas of responsibility of government departments and the standing committees of parliament. The pattern is slightly complicated by the fact that each house has its own set of committees, as well as a third set of committees which are “joint” standing committees composed of members of both houses, although these also cohere with department areas (for example, defense, foreign affairs, health and so on). If standing committees of the lower House of Representatives are considered, the congruence is very close.

The parliamentary Rules of Procedure do not prescribe a particular distribution of subject areas among committees. Instead, distribution is based on custom, tradition and ad hoc decisions by the Chamber of Deputies and its Organizational Committee. The subject areas of committees and ministries normally do not coincide. After the 2006 elections, the number of committees was increased, thereby making the division of labor among committees more similar to that among the ministries than in the previous term. The fact that task areas have not fully coincided has not infringed upon parliamentary oversight of the government. A mirror committee system may not be needed, as some departments have little in the way of a legislative agenda.

In general, the task areas of parliamentary committees and ministries coincide. But because the Basic Law provides for the establishment of several committees that do not have a ministerial counterpart (the Committee on the European Union; the Petitions Committee; the Parliamentary Control Panel), this is not always the case. Furthermore, several committees sometimes deal with matters that are the responsibility of a single ministry (e.g., the Committee on Internal Affairs and the Sports Committee both monitor activities performed by the Federal Ministry of the Interior), and a single committee sometimes deals with matters that are not clearly assigned to a single ministry. Rule 63 of the Rules of Procedure of the German Bundestag defines the proceedings in cases where multiple committees share responsibilities. Nonetheless, parliamentary committees’ most important task areas fully coincide with those of the ministries, enabling effective monitoring.

The number of committees exceeds the number of ministries. Except for the committee on EU affairs, however, all committees oversee just one ministry, so that the committee structure does not hamper the monitoring of government activity.

The Diet’s standing committees closely correspond to the jurisdiction of the government’s major ministries. Indeed, the areas of committee jurisdiction are defined in this manner. The portfolios of the ministers of state – there have been up to five such ministers in recent cabinets, coving task areas such as financial services, consumer affairs and civil service reform – are not covered by committees with the same task areas. There are a number of additional standing committees carrying out tasks such as disciplinary matters or other functions.

There are five types of parliamentary committees: fixed and temporary commissions, theme committees, parliamentary inquiry committees and residual committees. Most committees have 25 members, and each political party provides at least one member who belongs to the parliament. Parliamentary committees with jurisdictions mirroring those of the ministries monitor the ministerial departments. The committees specialize in particular topics. The fixed committees mirror the policy domains of the ministries. However, the Ministry of General Affairs lacks a fixed parliamentary committee. Committees mirroring departments in general effectively monitor their work. Other types of committees address other, more in-depth issues which are not always the responsibility of one ministry (e.g., the temporary committees on integration policy, expenditure of health care provision, and infrastructure projects). Theme committees address technology policy and senior citizens policy. Occasionally, parliamentarian inquiries are held, such as the inquiries on the fall of Srebrenica and the construction sector fraud. Residual committees may address a wide array of topics, including government expenditure, credentials, operating procedures, information and safety agencies, and the renewal of the Parliamentarian Survey Act. However, much criticism has been triggered by the high degree of task area coincidence between parliament and ministries and the way parliamentary inquiries are conducted. Instrumental discussions by parliamentarian committees are argued to have eliminated fundamental political-ideological discussions.

The number of committees exceeds the number of ministries. However, some of the committees deal exclusively with internal parliamentary issues, and most ministries, including the more important ones, have just one matching committee. The distribution of subject areas among committees does not infringe upon parliament’s ability to monitor ministries.

In the term from 2006-2010, there were more committees than ministries, but all ministerial task areas were covered by committees and there was just one committee – the Committee for Human Rights, Minorities and the Status of Women – with several ministerial counterparts. The division of subject areas among committees did not hamper the parliamentary control of ministries.

The structure of committees in the House of Representatives corresponds only in a rough way to the structure of the executive branch. But the deviations from such correspondence have little or no adverse effect on the ability of the House to monitor ministerial activities and performance – an ability that is, for other reasons, undoubtedly an outstanding feature of the U.S. Congress. With the growing ideological division between the two parties in Congress, the committees’ monitoring of the executive increasingly reflects the current political context. The majority party in each chamber (House and Senate) controls the agendas of the committees. Under divided party control of government, monitoring is thus more intense and shaped by political objectives. When the Democrats took over both houses of Congress in 2006, this led to two years of constant criticism and investigation of the Republican Bush administration. With the Democrats winning the presidency in 2008, the congressional scrutiny became less intense, more congenial, and less useful in terms of providing accountability.
Because members of Congress develop large stakes in monitoring and influencing particular programs, the structure of the congressional committee system often functions as a serious barrier to appropriate reorganization of the executive branch. Members of Congress oppose reorganizations that would disrupt their committee- and subcommittee-based relationships with particular programs and their constituencies, and such resistance is frequently a fatal obstacle to reorganization. In the example of financial regulatory reform, committee jurisdiction stood in the way of organizational reform because the proposed abolition of the Office of Thrift Supervision would have resulted in a committee losing its jurisdiction.

Even though parliamentary committees outnumber ministries, the task areas of parliamentary committees are identical to the tasks of the ministries with only minor exceptions.

The number of parliamentary committees in the Chamber of Deputies is slightly larger than the number of ministries. Several committees are created to keep track of exactly the same area as that of a given ministry (e.g., defense, justice, finance or external affairs). Other committees can be more specific than the ministry (e.g., the committees of globalization and accounting), or instead meant to be broader when several dimensions are involved (e.g., committee of public health, environment and society’s renewal). The committees are thus largely able to monitor ministries, but the head of a given ministry is only accountable to its minister.

There are currently 24 standing or permanent committees of the House of Commons and 18 standing committees of the Senate, as compared to 26 government departments. Consequently, there is more or less a one-to-one relationship between the number of House committees and departments. Parliamentary committees are largely capable of monitoring departments.

The committee structure largely corresponds to the structure of ministries. The Ministry of Social Affairs, for instance, corresponds to the Social Affairs committee in the People’s Assembly (Folketing). The Ministry of Taxation corresponds to the Fiscal Affairs committee in the assembly. Other committees, for instance, deal with energy, defense, culture, environment, health and education, and all know who “their” minister is. A few committees don’t have such an easy parallel, such as the European Affairs committee. Although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is responsible for coordinating EU policy, the European Affairs committee will have consultations (samråd) with all ministers that take part in EU council meetings, and seek a mandate for upcoming negotiations in the council. So this creates some internal coordination problems in the People’s Assembly, between the European Affairs committee and the committees dealing with the substance of EU legislation (fagudvalg).

The three main types of committees are standing committees, select committees, and joint committees (containing members drawn from both houses of parliament). There are now no fewer than 19 joint committees. Most select and joint committees mirror a ministerial department. However, there are exceptions. A single committee covers both the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. There are some cross-cutting committees, such as Economic Regulatory Affairs, that do not directly mirror a single department.

The tasks of committees and ministries mostly coincide. However, there are a few cases where more than one ministry is overseen by a single committee (for instance, this happens with the Presidency of the Council and the Ministry of the Interior, for the ministries of Cultural Affairs and Education, and for the ministries of the Environment and Public Works). Parliamentary committees have instruments at their disposal enabling the effective monitoring of ministry activity. However, parliamentarians are not always interested in fully exploiting these possibilities.
The activities of ministers without portfolio might receive less oversight. However, their tasks often fall under the responsibility of the constitutional affairs committees of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

The tasks areas of parliamentary committees do not match the task area of ministries in total. Sometimes control responsibilities are split because of developments within the government. An example in the 2009 government is that the minister for agriculture, viticulture and rural development is also minister for sports and deputy minister for social economy. The Ministry for Agriculture has a committee of its own, while sports issues are amalgamated with education, and social economy is combined with economy and foreign trade.
With the creation of the super-ministry for sustainable development, the parliamentary committee has also been redefined to correspond to its new responsibilities.
Joint meetings of two or more committees take place if the subject topic requires it.

There is not perfect overlap between the organization of the parliament and the government. There are 13 parliamentary committees, and 17 ministries in addition to the Office of the Prime Minister. Some parliamentary committees therefore have a slightly broader task and mandate than others.

There is nearly exact correspondence between the number and task areas of the 17 ministries and those of the Congress’ 19 regular legislative committees. In fact, the restructuring of ministerial portfolios in 2008 and 2009 was immediately mirrored by a reorganization of the composition and names of the permanent legislative committees in both the Congress and the Senate. The only exceptions are the International Development Committee, which does not match up with any particular ministry, and the split of the task areas for the Ministry of Economy and Finance into two different committees: Budget, and Economy and Finance. For all the others, each parliamentary committee corresponds to one existing ministry. In the case of sports (an area under the direct responsibility of the prime minister), the parliamentary committee in charge is Education and Sports, which also oversees the Ministry of Education. The Constitutional Committee, apart from other functions as its name denotes, monitors the activities of the government office (Ministerio de la Presidencia), which has had responsibility for public administration policy-making since 2009. The Senate has 21 regular parliamentary legislative committees (the two additional ones deal with autonomous regions and local government).

Nonetheless, even if the task areas of parliamentary committees and ministries fully coincide, the legislature fails to monitor ministries effectively on the basis of factors which are connected to the much broader structural features of the Spanish parliamentary system such as the electoral system, party discipline or the constitutional powers of the executive.

There is no perfect overlap between the ministries and the parliamentary committees. The task areas of ministries change along with changes in the party composition of government and with changes in the number of ministries. The parliamentary committee system is characterized by much higher stability than the ministry organization. The prime minister can decide for him/herself how many ministries there should be and what their task area should be. Reorganizing the parliamentary committee structure is a far more complicated process.

The Swiss government has only seven ministries, and any attempt to enlarge this number has failed due to political opposition in parliament. Hence, most of the seven ministries have responsibility for many more fields than in other democracies. There are 10 parliamentary committees dealing with legislation and three committees have oversight functions (such as the Finance Committee, which supervises the financial management of the confederation), as well as four other committees that have additional tasks (such as the drafting committee, which checks the wording of bills and legal texts and sets the final version before the final vote). Thus, the task areas of the parliamentary committees do not correspond closely to the task areas of the ministries. Nonetheless, this does not indicate that the committees are not able to monitor the ministries.

The oversight role of the Chilean legislature lies mainly with the Chamber of Deputies and its 23 committees. These coincide in part with the 22 line ministries, but there are various exceptions in which a single committee is responsible for the area of various ministries, or one ministry’s area of responsibility is distributed across multiple committees. It should be noted that Chile is not a parliamentary system, and thus ministers are not directly accountable to the Chilean congress. Therefore, the degree of control exercised by the congressional committees is naturally rather weak.

During the period under review, there were 12 ministries in the state administration and 12 parliamentary committees whose areas of responsibility coincided almost fully with the ministries. There are two economic committees, one on economy and taxes and one on commerce. These coincide with the Ministry of Economy and Commerce and the Ministry of Finance. Two of the 12 parliamentary committees have a special role connecting them to the government. The committee responsible for finance and budget preparation has the authority to request information from institutions and companies that ask for funding from the budget. The Committee on Foreign Affairs has advisory status vis-à-vis the government regarding all major international policies, and the government is obliged to discuss all major decisions concerning international affairs with the committee. Parliamentary committees rarely oppose or contradict the ministries because the government parties have a majority in the committees. Thus, the fact that the task areas of parliamentary committees and ministries nearly coincide is not a guarantee of effective monitoring, as the majority and chairperson of every committee belong to the governing parties. Minority members from the opposition benches can, however, use the committees as a venue to voice their opinions. Whether the planned reduction in the number of ministries from 12 to nine will lead to a corresponding change in the committee structure remains to be seen. Experience suggests that this will be the case.

There are currently 13 committees in Portugal’s Assembly of the Republic. The only committee to be added since the 2009 SGI report is the Committee of Ethics, Society and Culture. By including culture, this committee partially rectifies the situation identified in the 2009 report, in which one committee monitored three different ministries, one of which was culture. However, as there are 15 executive ministries, there inevitably remain cases of committees that oversee more than one ministry. Indeed, there are two committees monitoring more than one ministry: One monitors the ministries of Justice and of Internal Administration; the other the ministries of Education and of Science, Technology and Higher Education.

According to Article 20 of the parliamentary rules of procedure, 12 out of 19 standing parliamentary committees are designed in parallel to the ministerial structures. However, they do not provide effective independent monitoring of the ministries. The primary function of the committees is to examine the draft bills. In the process of discussions, committees may also supervise the activities of the ministries indirectly.

Every government department is shadowed by a committee in the House of Commons (at the time of writing, there were 19 of these committees). The remit and number of committees changes to reflect changes in the makeup of the government. Recent changes have included the creation of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, which examines the performance of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change, as well as the Business Innovation and Skills Committee, and the Science and Technology Committee in October 2009. House of Lords select committees are less directly matched to departmental task areas, but cover important broad areas – one example being the European Union Select Committee, which in turn has subcommittees that cover distinctive topics such as economic and financial affairs or the environment from an EU perspective.

However, the capacity of committees to monitor effectively is limited due to a lack of resources and limited continuity in membership (House of Lords rules oblige members to be rotated off a committee after four years, for example). This disjunction between full coincidence and effectiveness of scrutiny somewhat diminishes this variable.

The Greek parliament maintains committees whose area of competence roughly coincides with that of sets of related ministries. For example, the Standing Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs exercises parliamentary control over and debates bills submitted by the two ministries mentioned in its title. Even though there are fewer parliamentary committees than ministries (six standing committees, 13 ministries in the Papandreou government), committees are not overburdened. This is because committees are allowed to form subcommittees from among their members in order to cover the task areas of particular ministries. An example is the Subcommittee on Defense, which is an outgrowth of the Standing Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs. In addition, some committees hold a competence of a “horizontal nature,” spanning more than one policy sector. Examples are the Special Permanent Committee on Technology Assessment and the Special Permanent Committee on Equality and Human Rights.
As in many other contemporary democracies, the legislature in Greece faces the challenge of responding to the increasing power of the executive. Greek governments produce many new regulations of their own, and also transpose EU legislation, while members of parliament may not be always resourceful enough to grapple with the many different and complex aspects of new legislation.
The effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny of the ministries is limited by intragovernmental features of poor coordination, information and data, as well as a lack of transparency. Indeed, if scrutiny of the ministries from the center of government is limited, it is not surprising that the parliament too struggles in this respect. This is not, in the main, a result of any mismatch of committees and ministries.

The New Zealand House of Representatives is too small to establish as many select committees as would be necessary to fully correspond to the number of ministries. At the moment there are 21 select committees which have to face 57 portfolios, led by 20 cabinet ministers, three ministers outside cabinet and five support party ministers.

The task areas of parliamentary committees and ministries mostly correspond, but the parliament is not fully able to monitor ministries. While the parliament can summon and question ministers, the role of the minister in the Korean system is relatively weak. The professional bureaucracy in Korea is trained to be loyal to the president as the head of the government. The capacity of the ministerial bureaucracy is also vastly larger than that of the parliament. Consequently, parliamentary oversight is sufficient in fields that are hotly debated issues in the public, and are thus of interest for the parliament; however, oversight is weak in the vast majority of policy fields that fall outside the mainstream debate.

There are far more committees than there are cabinet secretaries. This is a factor that works against making congressional committee structures effective.

There is no coincidence between the structures of ministries and those of parliamentary committees. The number of parliamentary committees is limited to eight (six until the constitutional reform in 2008) while there are 25-30 ministries. This rule was meant as, and resulted in, a limitation of deputies’ power to follow and control closely and precisely each ministry’s activity. But, in the last decades, new institutional arrangements have been set up, which sidestep these limits and lead to new sorts of committees, whether permanent or not, on specific questions.