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Why have the national governments of EU member states successively endowed the European Parliament with supervisory budgetary, and legislative powers? Rittberger develops a theory of delegation to representative institutions, and demonstrates just how and why the European Parliament has become so powerful.

The model of EU legislative politics developed by Garrett & Tsebelis has served as the main reference point for scholars studying the EU legislative process. It stipulates that the preferences of actors in the EU legislative process (the member states, the European Parliament, & the Commission) are distributed one-dimensionally along a more-less integration continuum. Furthermore, the Garrett-Tsebelis model predicts that under the rules governing the co-decision introduced at Maastricht, the European Parliament will be systematically worse off than under the revisions of the cooperation procedure & will, as a result, invariably accept any legislation proposed by the pivotal Council member state. This article argues that the Garrett-Tsebelis model falls short of explaining why the European Parliament sometimes rejects legislation. It also demonstrates that the European Parliament may actually be more influential under the co-decision procedure than Garrett & Tsebelis suggest. By analyzing different directives that are subject to the co-decision procedure -- thus keeping the institutional rules of co-decision constant -- it can be demonstrated that actors' time horizons (their levels of impatience) & the type & salience of issue-dimensions (more or less integration, left-right, changes in institutional rules) exercise independent effects on legislators' influence & on legislative outcomes. This article thus explains cases otherwise unexplained by the "standard version.". 1 Figure, 52 References. Adapted from the source document.

The rapid proliferation of EU agencies represents one of the most significant changes to the EU's organisational set-up in past decades. At the same time, this development has significantly affected regulatory policy-making in the EU.This volume assembles the most renowned scholars in the field to address the key themes and challenges that agency governance in the EU poses to effective and legitimate policy-making. The first theme addresses the causes and dynamics of the creation and design of regulatory bodies in EU governance, focusing not only on EU agencies but also on alternatives to the

AbstractIn light of the German government's long‐held preference against EU‐wide fiscal burden‐sharing, a hallmark of the Euro crisis, its support for an EU‐wide debt‐instrument during the COVID‐19 pandemic constitutes a dramatic policy U‐turn. To make sense of the 'Berlin puzzle', we develop a theoretical mechanism that explores why an initially reluctant German government heeded to the call for transnational fiscal solidarity: First, to avoid a 'common bad' of a large‐scale economic contraction, proposals for an EU‐wide fiscal response became a political imperative. Second, the successful framing of the crisis as 'nobody's fault' rendered the call for European solidarity as the dominant standard of legitimacy to which all governments subscribed. Third, governments whose preferences were not aligned with this standard faced mounting normative pressure and isolation. As a result, governments changed their positions, but not their preferences. We probe this mechanism by carrying out a process‐tracing analysis of the German government's fiscal policy U‐turn in the crucial months preceding the adoption of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery plan in July 2020. The paper contributes to the growing literature on fiscal burden‐sharing in the EU by demonstrating when and how member states can change their stance on transnational fiscal burden‐sharing.