The European Parliament in Legislation

This chapter examines the driving forces of the EP’s formal and informal institutional power gains in the EU’s legislative process. Over a period of around fifty years, the institutional rule went from giving the EP a merely consultative role in the legislative procedure to establishing it as a coequal legislator with the Council of Ministers under the ordinary legislative procedure. We assess the extent to which this development was accelerated by the EP itself and analyse which of its strategies succeeded or failed in widening the EP’s powers. The strategies of unilateral action, arena-linking and alliance are found to be most important in bringing about this outcome.