In 2002, the European Parliament and the Council concluded an Interinstitutional Agreement (IIA) on access to sensitive documents in the area of security and defence. The agreement gives the Parliament privileged access to documents that are withheld from the public. This article suggests two...

Since its early beginnings, the member states of the European Communities have tried to establish a common foreign policy and at the same time were reluctant to implement it. Only the Maastricht Treaty introduced an institutional framework. However, the emerging Common Foreign and Security...

The paper examines a key dimension of democratic control, namely parliamentary control of military missions and presents the findings of an in-depth case study on the EU’s maritime mission Atalanta that was launched to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia. The case study finds that none of...

This paper analyses the prominence, content and justifications of Euroscepticism as a form of EU legitimacy contestation. Support of and opposition to European integration have so far been mainly measured through the positions of political parties or citizens’ attitudes through public opinion...

The role and functioning of the upper chambers of Central and Eastern European (CEE) parliaments have for a long time been a minor topic on the research agenda of legislative specialists. This paper seeks to fill the gap in existing research by aiming to determine the main effects caused by the...

After each European election nearly half of the outgoing Members of the European Parliament re-enter the EP for an additional legislative term. Despite this being a persistent phenomenon, the reasons behind it are still unclear. In this paper I test the hypothesis that the work of an MEP in the...

This paper shows that the main pattern of European democratisation has unfolded along the lines of an EU organised as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has...