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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.

When do parliaments debate European Union policies? Normative arguments suggest that debates enhance government accountability. Others warn of government bias, declining debate near elections, and parties avoiding Eurosceptic publics. Our conclusions are more differentiated. We argue that rank-and-file parliamentarians rather than leaders initiate debates. Political incentives guide their debate selection towards salient policies in the countries in which voters care most. However, where the motivation Eurosceptic publics provide and institutions facilitating rank-and-file agenda-setting are lacking, EU law-making and European Council priorities will raise little parliamentary attention. Analysis of original data, using a Bayesian and multilevel framework, lends credibility to our views. Claims of a government bias, election effects, or trends towards more debate are unlikely to hold in all countries.

Scholars interested in the role of national parliaments in the EU legislative process hardly paid attention to the differences in scrutiny between Upper Houses of EU member states. It is hypothesized in this article that structural differences between bicameral systems can explain differences between Upper Houses in scrutiny of EU legislative proposals. The hypotheses are assessed with a qualitative content analysis of parliamentary debates in the Dutch and British Upper Houses on the scrutiny of EU directives agreed upon through the ordinary legislative procedure in the period 2000–2010. The empirical findings indicate that differences in the set-up of bicameral systems can only in part explain the variation in ex ante scrutiny. Moreover, in both the British and Dutch bicameral systems, MPs of the Upper and Lower Houses most of the time do not contradict each other on substantive grounds when the same EU legislative acts are scrutinized. The results also show that the scrutiny by Upper Houses imp...

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.