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Since the Lisbon Treaty National Parliaments (NPs) can play a formal role in the Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP). One of the complexities of this legislative process is that the formal decisions are pre-negotiated in informal trilogues between the Council, the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission. NPs have no role to play in trilogues, and have difficulties accessing information discussed in trilogue meetings, hindering MPs to hold their national government to account for decisions made in the Council. This article explores whether NPs monitor trilogue negotiations, and, if so, how and why do they do this. The empirical material is collected through semi-structured interviews with actors from several NPs and a content analysis of debates in two Member States. The results show that NPs operate in a formal and informal institutional context, both at the EU and national level. These institutional arrangements are used by MPs to lower costs of collecting information on trilogue negotiations in order to be able to hold the government to account and to steer the negotiation position of the government in the direction of their own policy positions. However, the increased attention for trilogue negotiations by NPs cannot alleviate the phenomenon of domestic de-parliamentarization.

Background: Histologic examination of resected pancreatic cancer after neoadjuvant therapy (NAT) is used to assess the effect of NAT and may guide the choice for adjuvant treatment. However, evaluating residual tumor burden in pancreatic cancer is challenging given tumor response heterogeneity and challenging histomorphology. Artificial intelligence techniques may offer a more reproducible approach. Methods: From 64 patients, one H&amp, E-stained slide of resected pancreatic cancer after NAT was digitized. Three separate classes were manually outlined in each slide (i.e., tumor, normal ducts, and remaining epithelium). Corresponding segmentation masks and patches were generated and distributed over training, validation, and test sets. Modified U-nets with varying encoders were trained, and F1 scores were obtained to express segmentation accuracy. Results: The highest mean segmentation accuracy was obtained using modified U-nets with a DenseNet161 encoder. Tumor tissue was segmented with a high mean F1 score of 0.86, while the overall multiclass average F1 score was 0.82. Conclusions: This study shows that artificial intelligence-based assessment of residual tumor burden is feasible given the promising obtained F1 scores for tumor segmentation. This model could be developed into a tool for the objective evaluation of the response to NAT and may potentially guide the choice for adjuvant treatment.

In parliamentary debates, members of a national parliament (MPs) often refer to the policy experiences of other countries addressing similar problems to those with which the MPs are confronted. When MPs make such references, the diffusion of policy ideas from one country context to another can occur. This article explores policy diffusion in plenary debates by answering the following questions: to what extent do references by MPs to the policies of other countries change over time and across policy areas; and what are the country- and policy-specific drivers of, respectively, the number of references to other countries and how MPs use information on policy experiences from other country contexts? The results of the analysis of Dutch Lower House debates on education and environmental policies for the period 1995–2012 show that the cross-national diffusion of policy ideas by MPs follows a punctuated equilibrium logic. Moreover, Dutch MPs refer more often to policies of larger countries and of EU member states. Finally, in policy fields with a high likelihood of externalities, the diffusion of policy ideas from the three countries most referred to by MPs occurs mainly through the mechanism of interdependence.

This article focuses on one of the more elaborate new modes of governance in function in the EU context — the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) — and examines its varying degree of institutionalization on policy fields. Three explanations for differences in institutionalization of OMCs are tested through a comparative study of two OMCs adopted in policy fields related with the knowledge-based society theme. The empirical findings indicate that the institutionalization of an OMC can be best explained by a particular constellation of member-state preferences, in combination with a catalytic role of the European Commission.

The Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) promises to involve a broad range of actors, including members of national parliaments. Several scholars showed that the OMC breaks this promise by affecting the national policy-making process outside of the control of national parliaments. However, this finding can be called into question; scholars drew heavily on anecdotal evidence and did not take sufficiently into account differences between OMCs and member states. This article empirically investigates the use of three OMCs by parliamentarians in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to assess the performance of national policies related to the knowledge-based society theme. It will be shown that the use of information from OMCs by parliamentarians is dependent on the information provided by the government on the policies OMCs touch upon and the presence of simple benchmarks in an OMC. Moreover, parliamentarians in a consensus democracy use the OMC more frequently.