Research Papers

The financial and sovereign debt crisis is accelerating the institutional development of the euro area. Scholars have characterised the EU's crisis response largely in terms of rising intergovernmentalism. This paper argues that such analysis overlooks the role of a powerful supranational actor - the European Parliament (EP). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolving role of the EP as a legislator on the basis of two case studies: the legislative packages on financial supervision and economic governance. These two case studies are interesting to analyse as they represent the most comprehensive reforms in financial and economic governance since the launch of the euro. Moreover, while the financial supervisory package mainly entailed the issue of "more or less European integration", the one on economic governance also posed highly divisive ideological questions along the 'left-right' axis. In view of this high politicization, the EP is expected to depart from its consensus-seeking modus operandi highlighted so far by the literature. By comparing the two legislative packages, the paper aims at assessing the extent to which internal ideological divisions affect the EP's external behaviour, notably in trilogue negotiations. It argues that despite different degrees of internal cohesion on financial supervision and economic governance, the EP behaved in similar ways in both negotiation processes. This is visible both in the substance of the EP position - the issues the EP chose to promote in both packages - as well as in the form - the strategy used. Thus, this paper argues that the degree of ideological differentiation internally had had a very limited impact on the political behaviour of the EP externally.