Legislative Power of the European Parliament Committees: Plenary Adoption of Committee Reports

Yordanova, Nikoleta (2009) Legislative Power of the European Parliament Committees: Plenary Adoption of Committee Reports. In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper questions the claim that the European Parliament (EP) is a legislature with strong committees. It examines to what extent the plenary adopts committee reports as the official parliamentary legislative positions under codecision. The committees’ impact is expected to be substantially weakened when an informal early agreement is reached with the Council. Furthermore, following the predictions of congressional theories, committees are expected to be more successful if the legislators drafting their reports have no special outlying interests, have relevant expertise, and are affiliated with big party groups. These hypotheses are tested on an original data set on all codecision reports which passed first reading in the 6th EP so far (2004- 2009). The findings suggests that indeed informal trilogue agreements significantly undermine committees’ legislative influence, which is somewhat counteracted by the expertise of rapporteurs.

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