"We are the employment team": Socialisation in European Parliament committees and possible effects on policy-making

EP committees have become a key element in the EU policy-making process and can be seen as a vital contribution to the shaping of legislation: Westlake (1994, p. 191) effectively described them as the “legislative backbone” of the EP. Although committees play such an important role within the EP until the mid 1990s they rarely were at the focus of academic attention. More recently some studies have tried to shed some light on these fora in order to explain how they contribute to the functioning of the EP as a whole (Mamadouh and Raunio 2003; McElroy 2001; Whitaker 2005; Hix and Noury and Roland 2005). What however can be seen as a lacuna in EP committee research is the examination of the question of how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are socialized into EP committees and whether this process has an impact on the decision-making process within the EP, for example has an effect on consensus formation in any way