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In Thomas Malang, the department has another Emmy Noether group leader. The political scientist can draw on around 1.1 million euros for his research, which the Emmy Noether Programme will make available to him for the next six years. This will finance a junior research group he chairs under the title "The Foreign Relations of National Legislators. Structures, Explanations, Effects", which also includes two doctoral students. The central topic of the group is the role of national parliaments in international politics. In this way, the junior research group contributes to the investigation of new democratic fields of tension that arise due to growing globalization and Europeanization. The Emmy Noether Program established by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) promotes the independence of outstanding young researchers.

The legislative power is generally considered the institutional loser of internationalization. While governments negotiate and sign a growing number of bilateral and multilateral treaties, e.g. trade agreements or resolutions of supra- and international organizations, parliaments are usually left with only the function of final ratification. Recently, however, it can be observed that parliaments worldwide are increasing their activities beyond their own nation-state. Almost every parliament worldwide now maintains bilateral and multilateral relations. To date, we have little systematic evidence of what concrete goals parliaments pursue through these activities, i.e., whether this parliamentary foreign policy serves to gather information, support democratization, or control the executive branch. Furthermore, the question arises whether the international relations of parliaments have an influence on international or domestic policy outcomes. The new research group will address these questions. The innovation of the project consists in the systematic establishment of parliamentary external relations as a sui generis research object. This makes it possible, on the one hand, to explain the reasons for the emergence of parliamentary foreign policy and, on the other hand, the project promises to systematically analyze their consequences for international and national policy.