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The thesis of a ‘politicisation’ of European integration has been influential both for research about the EU and comparative research on political parties. However, the debate triggered by this thesis remains elusive, inter alia, with regard to the thematic structure and the interaction modes of parties within controversies about EU multi-level governance. Against this background, the present article maps the thematic and party political dimension of controversies and asks for linkages between both dimensions in 31 parliamentary debates about the EU in France, Germany and the UK between 2005 and 2009. The empirical evidence from these debates suggests that a categorisation of different thematic aspects of debates can be used to map and explain the emergence of several types of polarisation between political parties, thus elucidating different variants of ‘politicisation’ of European affairs and working towards their systematic explanation.

Most studies about the role of independent agencies in the European context focus on the driving forces that condition the incentives of political actors to delegate policy‐making competencies, and that influence the agency design and the consequences of delegation for democratic control. However interesting, these studies often disregard the question of the legitimacy of the agencies in the post‐delegation phase. This article aims at redressing this important blind spot in the current literature by highlighting the need for procedural input‐legitimacy at the stage of agency operation. It argues that procedural credibility is a fundamental property that explains the need for an increased interaction between agencies and stakeholders at the post‐delegation stage. The article examines three prominent cases of agencies in Europe — the European Food Safety Authority, the European Medicines Agency and the European Patent Office — in order to assess the extent to which the institutionalization of stake...