The European Parliament as a developing legislature: coming of age in trilogues?

ABSTRACT

This article examines the institutionalization of the European Parliament-as-a-legislature. It draws on the political development scholarship to conceptualize institutionalization and highlight the role of the environment in the development and decay of political institutions. On this premise, we argue that the political significance of the European Parliament (EP) depends on its capacity to develop strong institutions enabling it to ‘exist apart’ from its environment. We identify the embrace of codecision as a critical moment of the institutionalization of the EP-as-a-legislature and explore the value of the political development perspective in a comparative-historical study of trilogues in the EP. We present a typology of institutionalization of trilogues and argue that a model of generic parliamentary approach to trilogues is taking roots. While substantiating the thesis of the EP as a potentially autonomous institution, our findings also call for research into the resilience and sources of institutional patterns of trilogues.

KEY WORDS:

• European Parliament
• legislature
• political development
• trilogues

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Chiara de Franco, Igor Guardiancich, Haakon Andreas Ikonomou, Morten Kallestrup, Niels Lachmann and Wilhelm Lehmann for their insightful comments on various versions of the manuscript. We are also indebted to the two anonymous JEPP reviewers for their detailed and constructive feedback

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Christilla Roederer-Rynning is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern Denmark.

Justin Greenwood is professor at the Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Danish Council for Independent Research (FSE) for the project ‘The parliamentarization of EU politics: what implications for European Democracy?’ [11-104384].