Abstract: The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) is understood as an important new "instrument" in the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) "toolbox", designed to respond to the contemporary security environment as well as to overcome the inaction and hesitancy of the past....

The role and functioning of the upper chambers of Central and Eastern European (CEE) parliaments have for a long time been a minor topic on the research agenda of legislative specialists. This paper seeks to fill the gap in existing research by aiming to determine the main effects caused by the...

This study analyses party group cohesion and patterns of defections of national party delegations from party group lines in the present European Parliament, using a total of 1,370 roll call votes. The study confirms previous findings according to which party groups in the EP show (surprisingly)...

What kind of political system is the European Union and what will it be like in the future? Questions about the present and the future are hard to keep apart as the EU is an evolving project, currently engaged in the twin processes of enlargement and constitution making. When discussing the...

In this paper we elaborate on the analytical framework linking the three RECON democracy models to political representation and claims-making during the European elections campaign. Relying on the models of delegated, federal and regional-cosmopolitan democracy as ideal-types we develop a...

In the three latest treaty reforms changes have been made to the procedures that regulate the legislative interaction between the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council. Whether the introduction of the co-operation procedure (1987), the co-decision procedure (1994) and the reform of...

The co-decision procedure has had significant implications for the interaction between the EU institutions and has attracted the attention of a series of formal, rational choice institutionalists. However, these have mostly dealt with the Commission in a relatively superficial way and their...

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...

In this article I conduct an institutional analysis on the balance of power existent in the EU, both before the enforcement of the Lisbon Treaty and after. I study the new decisional mechanisms as provided by the treaty, and try to determine the changes in the interactions between institutions,...