"Institutional change in the European Union: Maastricht and the European Parliament"

The Maastricht Treaty introduced substantial reforms in numerous directions; analysts and practitioners have yet to be agreed, however, on the implications of many of those innovations. One important example is the co-decision legislative procedure. Contrary to the original ‘conventional wisdom,’ recent ‘revisionist’ scholarship has suggested that co-decision may have significantly weakened the law-making role of the European Parliament. In this paper, I examine these alternative claims. Drawing on both a spatial model of European legislative bargaining and empirical evidence from the actual operation of co-decision, I argue that the revisionist claims are supported. Implications of these findings for the current and future status of the Parliament, as well as for the study of institutionalist change in the EU more generally, are evaluated in the conclusion