"If one wants to understand why, from its modest beginnings, the European Parliament has become a major player in EU decision-making, look no further than this book. It presents, to date, the theoretically most compelling, methodologically disciplined and empirically richest account of parliamentary self-empowerment over time, across key functions and policy areas. This volume will be a main point of reference for work on the European Parliament, the dynamics of inter-institutional politics, and EU integration more generally for years to come."—Berthold Rittberger, Professor of International Relations, University of Munich, Germany “Anyone interested in the rise of the European Parliament as a significant actor in the EU should read this book. It offers a fascinating insight into the strategies used by the Parliament to achieve its aims and the conditions for its success or failure. It ranges widely across time and policy areas to give a comprehensive analysis of the Parliament’s changing institutional position.”—Michael Shackleton, Professor of European Institutions, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and former EP official This book analyses the European Parliament’s strategies of self-empowerment over time stretching across cases of new institutional prerogatives as well as substantive policy areas. It considers why and how the Parliament has managed to gain formal and informal powers in this wide variety of cases. The book provides a systematic and comparative analysis of the European Parliament’s formal and informal empowerment in two broad sets of cases: on the one hand, it examines the EP’s empowerment since the Treaty of Rome in three areas that are characteristic of parliamentary democracies, namely legislation, the budget, and the investiture of the executive. On the other hand, it analyses the European Parliament’s role in highly politicised policy areas, namely Economic and Monetary Governance and the shaping of EU trade agreements.

This comparative book analyses the development of regional integration parliaments in three different continents of the world. It assesses and compares the expansion and current stage of institutional development of three regional assemblies – the European Parliament, the Pan-African Parliament and the Mercosur Parliament for Latin America. Looking in particular at parliamentary agency, it aims to answer why and to what extent, these regional parliaments have developed differently in terms of their functions and legislative competences? Drawing on new and original empirical data, official documents, and secondary literature, the book focuses on the "critical junctures" in the trajectory of the three assemblies and argues that parliamentary agency has impacted the institutional development of the parliaments leading to diverse paths of regional parliamentarisation. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of global and regional governance, comparative regionalism, European Union studies, legislative studies and more broadly to international relations, history, law, political economy, and international organisations.

Separation of powers is the time-tested touchstone of the legitimate exercise of power in modern democracies. This collection examines decision-making in the EU's multilayered and polycentric constitutional structure through this lens. The focus on separation of powers reveals how strong executive powers collaborate in the EU as a single source of public power, which is not sufficiently counterbalanced by parliaments or the judiciary. The collection explores 3 policy fields marked by crisis: the economic and monetary union (EMU), migration, and trade. Drawing on expertise from across these sectors, with a strong conceptual thread linking all the contributions, this important work illustrates how different branches of government co-determine each others' powers.

Ten years after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, has executive predominance in EU-related matters disappeared? How have executive-legislative relations in the EU evolved over a crisis-ridden decade, from the financial and migration crises, to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic? The Lisbon Treaty could be expected to lead to the re-balancing of powers in favour of parliaments, for it significantly enhanced the roles of both the European Parliament and national parliaments. A decade later the contributions to this edited volume examine – for the first time in such an extensive breadth and from a multi-level and cross-policy perspective – whether this has actually materialised. They highlight that diverging tendencies may be observed, and that important variations over time have occurred, depending particularly on the occurrence of crises. As stated in the fascinating epilogue by Peter Lindseth (University of Connecticut School of Law), this is an 'admirably coherent collective volume, whose contributions provide an excellent overview of key aspects of executive-legislative relations in the European system since the Treaty of Lisbon'. This edited volume will hence be of interest to both academics and practitioners interested in future reforms designed at the European and national levels to improve the EU's democratic quality.

This open access book provides the first ever authoritative collection of scholarly insights, based upon original research, into the political groups of the EP tackling the fundamental changes since the Lisbon Treaty and the upsurge of radical right parties. It analyses political groups and their importance from multiple perspectives critically assessing their role and significance in EU politics. Each chapter is authored by leading scholars in the field, working on key topics in relation to political groups: political group formation and function, their role in parliamentary and EU policy-making, the way that Eurosceptic MEPs influence (or not) the Parliament, and the nature and form of interactions with external actors. In doing so, each chapter opens hitherto unexplored ‘black boxes’ in the political work of the EP, such as the internal practices of, and power relations within the political groups, and informal arenas of intra-group decision-making.

This book examines the rapidly expanding EU agency’s distinct role in EU border control, showing that Frontex is a prominent border control actor that reshapes the EU borders by promoting a new border control culture. Bringing culture into the analysis of Frontex, this book offers an alternative in-depth understanding of the agency’s function, focusing on the production and diffusion of border control assumptions and practices within a border control community. Based on data drawn from primary research at Frontex and two EU external borders, namely Lampedusa and Evros, this book examines Frontex’s contribution to the emergence of a new border control culture in Europe, replacing the pre-existing Schengen culture. Compared with the existing literature on Frontex, this novel account takes into consideration the evolving nature of borders and border control, discussing three contemporary challenges for the established border control regime: Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and hard security preoccupations, such as the fall-out from the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the weaponisation of migration at the Greek-Turkish land border. Frontex and the Rising of a New Border Control Culture in Europe will appeal to scholars and students of border management, EU studies, migration, geography, international relations, and security, along with policymakers and practitioners with an interest in EU border control and Frontex.

Great power competition is back on the world stage, and today’s international system is home to regional influences on great power relations that cannot be ignored. The United States’ unipolar moment is long over, and China’s hegemonic ambitions find expression in a comprehensive global competition with the US that plays out across multiple spheres of world politics. The US-China rivalry can be felt in geostrategic, economic, governance, diplomacy, intelligence, and technological spheres, to name a few. Most accounts of China-US relations in the context of great power conflict emphasize the many ways in which this rivalry has a ripple effect across the globe, with an impact upon the relations and interests of smaller powers. And while these effects are considerable and important, this book contends that attention must also be paid to the ways in which smaller, regional states have the potential to shape this great power rivalry. Put simply, great powers both shape, and are shaped by, smaller states. Any understanding of contemporary great power relations between the US and China requires both a top down, but also a bottom up consideration of the interplay between great powers and regional ones. Often the interests of regional powers are rooted in domestic considerations such as their identities and national interests, and these influences transcend borders and often have an impact upon the great powers. This book considers these smaller, regional actors and attempts to measure the extent to which they influence the US-China rivalry. For this study, constructivist theory, which prioritizes the agency that regional powers enjoy, is loosely used as a tool to enable a more robust and comprehensive understanding of the influences on the contemporary great power relationship. Each of the book’s chapters represents a region, or part of a region, that enjoys a considerable impact upon US-China relations.

Far from displaying a uniform pattern, European integration varies significantly across policy areas and individual countries. Why do some member states choose to opt out of specific EU policies? Why are some policies deeply integrated whereas others remain intergovernmental? In this updated second edition, the authors introduce the most important theoretical approaches to European integration and apply these to the trajectories of key EU policy areas. Arguing that no single theory offers a completely convincing explanation of integration and differentiation in the EU, this thought-provoking book provides a new synthesis of integration theory and an original way of thinking about what the EU is and how it works.

Leadership of powerful states and organizations is crucial for the success of regional integration projects. This book offers a theoretical model explaining such leadership. By applying the model to eurozone governance and reform, the book combines innovative theorizing on leadership in regional and international affairs with original research on Economic and Monetary Union politics. Six in-depth case studies analyze the (non-)leadership of Germany and EU institutions in eurozone crisis management. Moreover, the book evaluates the eurozone’s leadership record since the outbreak of its crisis and helps readers understand the leadership of collective actors, and the extent to which they can contribute to overcoming crisis and fostering European integration. In particular, the book investigates the under-researched questions of who provided leadership in the eurozone crisis and why, and which conditions are required to achieve successful leadership in the EU.

The Routledge Handbook of Parliamentary Administrations brings together an international, multidisciplinary group of contributors providing a systematic and comprehensive analysis of parliamentary administrations. Including chapters on the administrations of national parliaments in every member state of the European Union, in most of the EU candidate countries and in key liberal democracies around the world, this book represents a uniquely broad-ranging resource. Each national system is treated in a consistent manner, with authors providing relevant facts, figures and critical analysis according to a common framework. Additionally, it provides coverage of transnational parliamentary administrations in different regions around the globe and includes a number of cross-cutting chapters, addressing key issues of relevance for a better understanding of parliamentary administrations such as the potential for politicisation, professionalisation, digitalisation or Europeanisation with the comparative analysis of different national experiences. This handbook will enable readers to better comprehend the role and influence of parliamentary administrations and in doing so will enhance our understanding of their importance for the effective functioning of representative democracy more generally. The Routledge Handbook of Parliamentary Administrations constitutes a unique tool and prime reference for any researcher, scholar or practitioner working in the area of parliamentary and legislative studies, governance, democracy, public policy and administration, as well as more widely to European studies, general political science and comparative politics.