The reinforcement of the legislative and oversight powers of the European Parliament by virtue of successive treaty reforms over the last two decades has been in parallel with an expanding process of agency creation at the European Union (EU) level. While these two institutional developments entail major transformations of legislative-executive relations in the EU, the European Parliament oversight of EU agencies remains an underexplored topic of research. Based on an original dataset on parliamentary written questions overseeing EU agencies asked during the 2009-2014 Legislature, the paper analyses Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) questioning activity overseeing EU agencies. The paper argues that legislative oversight of agencies through written questions is driven by MEPs national party opposition status as well as by agency salience and size.

This article examines the decision to include interest group representation (IGR) in the most important decisionmaking bodies of European Union agencies (EAs). The study shows that there is considerable variation among agencies: some agencies have no IGR, others have formal rules that establish a clear distribution of the number of representatives among stakeholders, while other agencies are ambiguous with regard to the number of representatives that each group should have. In addition, interest group representatives have the right to vote in some of the agencies with IGR, while in others they only have an advisory role. This article identifies three broad types of groups normally represented: representatives of capital (e.g. industry), representatives of labor (e.g. trade unions), and citizens' representatives (e.g. non‐governmental organizations, consumer groups). The findings suggest that informative agencies are more likely to have IGR than agencies performing operational/management tasks. The findings also suggest that the involvement of the European Parliament in the design of EAs is more likely to lead to a provision for the representation of stakeholders. Finally, case studies of the European Food Safety Agency and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work demonstrate that interest groups could play an important role by pushing European Union institutions to include stakeholder representatives in EAs.

Some scholars consider that European Union agencies (EAs) were created as independent bodies in order to enhance the credibility of the European Union decision-making process. Scholars have typically focused on analyzing the relationship that these agencies have with politicians. However, relatively little attention has been paid to their relationship with stakeholders. This study examines the professional trajectory of EA board members, identifying their career ties with politicians and stakeholders. Using an original dataset on the career trajectories of 338 top-officials in 33 EAs, the findings provide evidence that the type of appointing body matters: On the one hand, the European Parliament is more likely -than the Commission-to appoint individuals having career ties to politicians; on the other hand, multiple veto players are less likely to designate board members linked to political players. Additionally, the findings suggest that agencies performing regulatory tasks seem to be more incline to have lower levels of de facto independence from politicians.

Her research focuses on accountability for public policies, accountability in European welfare states, European Parliament oversight, and interest group influence in European Union agencies.

The aim of this study is to present a framework for analyzing and assessing accountability for public policies. First, I suggest two dimensions for analyzing accountability for policies (the informative/justifying dimension, and the evaluative/sanctioning dimension), applied to the implementation phase of the policy and, in particular, to three central elements that make up this phase (the actors responsible, the resources, and the policy results). Second, I suggest assessing accountability for a public policy starting from the degree of formalization and, specifically, from compliance with four characteristics of its regulatory framework: specific, binding, public and autonomous character. Third, I develop an empirical application of this proposal to the analysis of health policy in Spain, whose decentralized design, where regional governments are responsible for its implementation, allows us to analyze the differences in the levels of accountability for this policy across regions. Points for practitioners This study identifies and limits the components that can be incorporated into the analysis of accountability for public policies by providing an analytical framework that can be used to measure and compare levels of accountability for different kinds of policies (e.g. health, education, pensions) in different contexts (e.g. countries, regions, local governments). In order to test the validity of the proposal developed here, this article presents an empirical application to the analysis of health policy in Spain, whose decentralized design allows us to analyze the differences in accountability across regional governments.