Twenty years of legislative codecision in the European Union : experience and implications

Abstract

Twenty years of practising codecision offers a welcome opportunity to pause and consider the structures, processes and policy impacts arising from this procedure and allows for a fine-grained analysis of the operation of codecision and its effects upon the various institutional actors. More specifically, it allows us to examine whether the European Parliament's (EP) role as a co-equal legislator has affected policy outcomes and patterns of democratic legitimacy within the wider political system of the European Union (EU). The editors of this collection are to be congratulated for collecting research results which differ greatly in their empirical focus and in the theories and methodologies used. They subject the diverse contributions to a set of common, important questions, i.e., how has the introduction of codecision affected political decision-making in the EU and to what extent has codecision contributed to a strengthening of the democratic legitimacy of EU decision-making?