"Interests, Issue Linkage and the Power of the European Parliament"

[From the introduction]. The European Parliament (EP), it is argued, was granted significant new powers following the institutional innovations of the Single European Act (SEA), and the Maastricht Treaty.' Its former institutional weakness was seen as the symptom of a serious "democratic deficit" in the European Union (EU), and the new powers as a partial remedy. This has prompted observers to try to define more precisely the way in which the EP can shape EU policy outcomes. In particular Tsebelis (1994a) has developed an elegant model which suggests the conditions under which the EP had the power to set the agenda when an issue was subject to the legislative process known as the cooperation procedure. Simply put, he shows that the EP (upon the second reading of a proposal) could set the agenda by adopting a set of amendments which some qualified majority of the member states preferred over the status quo....In what follows I rehearse Tsebelis' analysis in brief, and then show how his scheme applies specifically to the emissions control episode. The discussion which follows will, of necessity, deal with this formal scheme in telegraphic form; readers are urged to consult the original for full explanations of much that will be merely asserted here below