The legislative organization of the European Parliament (EP) has far-reaching implications for its ability to solve the democratic deficit problem of the European Union (EU). Recognizing that, this article reviews the literature on the EP organization with a view to consolidating existing...

This paper questions the claim that the European Parliament (EP) is a legislature with strong committees. It examines the extent to which the plenary draws its legislative position on the basis of the draft committee reports under the codecision procedure. It is expected that the committees’...

The effect of administrative discretion on the implementation of EU directives at the national level remains hotly contested in the academic literature. In this paper we offer a formal model which predicts that the effect of discretion on the timing of formal implementation is contingent on the...

Although most of the legislative tasks of the European Parliament (EP) are performed in its committees, it is controversial how representative they are of the overall plenary. Distributive, informational and partisan theories suggest respectively that the committee assignments system is designed...