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’...

This paper explores the relationship between administrative co-ordination of EU affairs at the national level and compliance with EU law. First, we develop two hypotheses about the impact of co-ordination. We expect that the strength of the co-ordination structure (level of centralisation and...

Recent methodological advances (evolutionary factor analysis, discourse networks, etc.) have re-invigorated interest in the study of policy frames and discourses. In this paper we study the changing policy frames surrounding Dutch soft drugs policy. The Dutch case is especially interesting not...

The increased use of early agreements in the EU co-decision procedure raises the concern that intra and inter-institutional political debate is sacrificed for the sake of efficiency. We investigate the effect of early agreements (trilogues) on the time it takes for legislation to be negotiated...