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We present an overview and the results of a shared-task hackathon that took place as part of a research seminar bringing together a variety of experts and young researchers from the fields of political science, natural language processing and computational social science. The task looked at ways to develop novel methods for political text scaling to better quantify political party positions on European integration and Euroscepticism from the transcript of speeches of three legislations of the European Parliament.Keywords: Political Text Scaling, Euroscepticism, Text as Data, Hackathon, Computational Social Science

Defence date: 7 June 2010 Awarded the François Mény Prize for the Best Comparative Study of Political Institutions, 2011 Examining Board: David Farrell (UCD), Mark Franklin (EUI), Adrienne Héritier (EUI/RSCAS) (Supervisor), Simon Hix (LSE) Awarded the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Prize for Best Dissertation in EU studies: the thesis marks a substantial contribution not only to the literature on parliaments in general and the European Parliament in particular, but also to the understanding of the democratic deficit in Europe and how it might be tackled. First made available online: 27 August 2021 The European Parliament (EP) now acts as an equal co-legislator with the Council of Ministers in adopting many policies that affect 500 million European citizens on a daily basis. However, the parliamentary legislative organisation is under-researched despite its profound consequences for EU policies and policy-making. Addressing this gap, this thesis studies the internal setup and legislative impact of the EP committees. Drawing on congressional literature, I confront distributive, informational and partisan theoretical approaches to answer the research questions of this project, namely whether and why the EP committees and their legislative output are dominated by preference-outlying legislators with special interests, experts serving the informational needs of the plenary, or loyal members of the working majority party group (coalition). Statistical analyses of committee assignments, allocation of legislative tasks, and adoption of committee reports in plenary are conducted using data on the 6th European Parliament (2004-2009). They are complemented with evidence from semi-structured interviews. The results show that legislators’ special interests and expertise account for the formally regulated assignment to committees depending on the predominant character of their legislative output (distributive or regulatory). In contrast, party group affiliation and loyalty shape the allocation of important legislative tasks in committees, owing to the informal allocation process. Furthermore, committee reports are more successful on the floor if drafted by rapporteurs from the working majority party group - perhaps a natural consequence of the EP open amendment rule. Thus, the parliamentary legislative output is ultimately controlled by the working majority party group and not committees. The congressional rationales fail to account for committees’ legislative influence when an informal early agreement is reached with the Council of Ministers. This occurs increasingly often, rendering decision-making in committees largely obsolete. The observed regularities are used to advance the literature on legislative organisation by identifying conditions under which each of the main congressional rationales can explain committee setup and influence, namely: 1) the policy areas a committee covers; 2) the parliamentary rules regulating committee-party and committee-plenary relationships; and 3) the balance of power and mode of negotiation between the legislative chambers. More substantively, the EP committees are not conducive for pursuing particularistic policies. Instead, they promote left-right party politics. This has important implications for EU legislative politics, interest representation, legitimacy, and more generally the EU democratic deficit.

Beyond the immediately visible plenum, parliaments are highly complex institutions. They work through various venues in which decisions are prepared or even taken. The two main institutions in this regard are parliamentary party groups, which comprise legislators who are elected under the same party label, and parliamentary committees, topic-specific sub-groups of legislators across all parliamentary party groups. Both fulfil important tasks in the internal organisation of legislatures and the processing of legislation.This dissertation analyses how parliamentary party groups organise their work in parliamentary committees. The first part of this book presents an analysis of the structural features of committees. To answer the question ‘why some legislatures with strong parliamentary party groups establish strong committees while others do not?’, the committee systems of 30 legislatures of countries with a parliamentary system of government are analysed.The next two empirical chapters of this book focus on the selection criteria of committee members and the room for manoeuvre of committee members after they have been assigned to a committee. The evidence for these chapters relies on in-depth analyses of the proceedings in a smaller number of legislatures: the Dutch Tweede Kamer, the German Bundestag and the Irish Dáil Éireann.