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This article investigates the determinants of assignments to European Parliament negotiating teams comprising both rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs. We reexamine the argument that under-representation of MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) from new Member States on these key posts after enlargement might have been due to a 'learning phase'. We find that MEPs from newer Member States remain considerably less likely to act as rapporteurs during the second term after enlargement . Most importantly, this trend also holds for shadow rapporteurships under the co-decision procedure, which is when they matter most. This structural under-representation entails important implications for European integration, most importantly that MEPs from newer Member States are less able to influence legislation. We suggest that the patterns we find could be the result of reduced willingness, a more limited skill set, or a structural disadvantage of MEPs from the accession states in the report allocation process.2

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This article investigates the impact of policy complexity on the duration of legislative negotiations in the European Union employing survival analysis. We conceptualize policy complexity as a three-dimensional construct encompassing structural, linguistic and relational components. Building on this conceptual framework, we measure the complexity of 889 Commission proposals published under the ordinary legislative procedure between 2009 and 2018. Controlling for institutional and political drivers of legislative duration identified by previous studies, we show that different types of policy complexity influence the duration of the decision-making process in the European Union to varying degrees, at different points in time and partially in unexpected ways. On a general level, our study highlights that developing a better understanding of the origins and consequences of policy complexity in the European Union is a key task for scholars of European integration.

This article identifies factors that have influenced the chances for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to become rapporteurs in the European Parliament after the 2004 eastern enlargement. More specifically, it answers the question of how the MEPs from the new member states were integrated into the report allocation process under different legislative procedures. Controlling for a whole range of alternative explanations such as legislative experience, attendance rates or party group membership, we find that MEPs from the accession countries were at a disadvantage when reports were distributed. Their chances of becoming rapporteurs were lower than those of their peers from the old member states. Most importantly, this pattern still holds when comparing MEPs from the accession countries with first-time MEPs from the old member states.

This study tests three hypotheses on factors driving the success and failure of amendments in the European Parliament's ENVI committee. The hypotheses, which are derived from different theories of legislative organization, are tested with an original dataset containing 550 amendments from 55 ENVI members. Contrary to existing empirical evidence on the structure of political conflict in plenary, the results suggest that a committee member's general ideological orientation on the left-right dimension is not decisive for his prospects to change the committee output. Instead, it seems like ENVI members with ties to green interest groups play a greater role in the formulation of environmental policies than committee members without comparable affiliations. Finally, the empirical evidence indicates that rapporteurs are only rarely challenged successfully by competing amendments. However, they are often willing to accept compromises.

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In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their proximity to economic matters: social, environmental, and morality policy. We make two contributions. First, we show that economic crises lead to more incrementalist patterns of policy change in crisis‐remote policy subsystems and make policy punctuations in these areas less likely. However, if such punctuations do occur, they tend to be particularly extreme. Second, we argue that the empirical implications of PET are best tested by separately analyzing variance as an indicator for incrementalism and degrees of freedom as an indicator for punctuations. The empirical analysis builds on two data sets capturing policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013).