"Reforming the European Parliament"

Neuhold, Christine (2003) "Reforming the European Parliament". In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 2003 (8th), March 27-29, 2003, pages 22, Nashville, TN.

Abstract

Institutional reform is once again one of the main issues on the EU's agenda. It has been a pertinent issue from Maastricht, Amsterdam to Nice. At its meeting in Lacken in December 2001, the European Council convened a Convention on the future of the European Union. The task of this forum is "to pave the way for the next Intergovernmental Conference as broadly and openly as possible" The Convention is currently at work in Brussels and, inter alia discussing proposals for institutional reform. Thus paper sets out to analyze the perspectives for reform for one of the institutions, the European Parliament (EP), which has come a long way from a deliberative assembly to a full fledged co-legislator (f not in all legislative fields). In this context the aim of the paper is threefold: to sketch the current demands for parliamentary reform; to examine the proposals currently ventilated to remedy the mentioned malaise; and to put these observations into a wider context, by briefly touching upon the issue whether the Convention could be seen as a forum where the notion of deliberative democracy prevails.