Catching the Runaway Bureaucracy in Brussels

Hae-Won Jun

European Union Politics, 2003, vol. 4, issue 4, 421-445

Abstract: The European Parliament (EP) can act as a democratic check on the European Commission. By relaxing the assumption of the EP as a unitary actor, this article examines factors determining the behaviour of individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in parliamentary scrutiny. It tests propositions based on the costs and benefits of each voting outcome in the context of the four EP roll-call votes cast in the period from 1995 to 2002 on the EP’s decision to grant budgetary discharge to the Commission. The main findings are: (i) ideology matters in the MEPs’ attitude toward the Commission; (ii) national parties influence the MEPs’ behaviour significantly in the discharge votes; and (iii) the ties between the Commissioners and the MEPs through national partisanship influence the MEPs’ attitude to the Commission when it is under threat.

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/146511650344003 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:4:y:2003:i:4:p:421-445

DOI: 10.1177/146511650344003

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().