"The European Parliament post-1993: Explaining macroscopic trends of Inter- and Intrainstitutional Developments"

This paper will examine the impact the last enlargements and treaty change have had on the European Parliament and the EU's system of legislative procedures. The paper assesses the dynamics of the European Parliament in operating according to a set of parliamentary functions. The overall question is, how the EP performs in adopting European legislation and in controlling the Union's quasi-executive brances. Do the rules provided by treaties, inter-institutional agreements and similar bases matter for the EP as a "multifunctional organization" (Judge/Earnshaw 2003: 24) and how do they matter for the repartition of workload within the European Parliament? In analysing the European Parliament's practice during the past 1994-1999, 1999-2004, and 2004-2009 legislatures, I propose to investigate the parliamentary implementation of the treaties and treaty amendments. In other terms, I explore the "real use" of different "constitutional offers" at hand. Constitutional offers are defined as the EU's treaty provisions and subsequent inter- and intra-institutional agreements that build on so-called "grey areas" of the treaties, a dynamic and evolving set of opportunity structures that provide parliamentarians with opportunity structures to participate in the EU's policy making process. I thus conceive the EU's primary law - the treaties and similiar constitutional acts like inter-institutional agreements - as subsequent propositions to the EU institutions and the Member States for joint decision making and for delegating power form one level to another. Evidently, the Union's constitutional bases do not "dictate" a clear nomenclature of procedures, actors to be involved and policy fields to be applied (Hofmann 2003). Instead, the institutions have to choose - by application of one or more legal bases. In other words, different constitutionalised procedural blueprints and inter-institutional rules "compete" for application. To capture the constitutionally based roles of the European Parliament, I distinguish and trace its different functions. Drawing on earlier works by Bourguignon-Wittke et al. (1985), Grabitz et al. (1988), Steppat (1988), Schmuck/Wessels (1989) and subsequent studies on the specific role of the European Parliament in a dynamic and evolving structure (Maurer 1996; Wessels 1996) I define these functions as policy-making, controlling, elective and system-developing (Maurer 2002: 86-88)