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Studies on the European Parliament have largely overlooked the impact of the inter-institutional context on its internal organisation. This paper argues that the stronger legislative powers of the Parliament vis-a-vis the Council of Ministers under the co-decision than under the consultation procedure affect the intra-parliamentary allocation of different types of legislative report. The analysis of the period 2004-07 shows that legislators from the centre-right party group coalition and loyal party group members are privileged in the allocation of co-decision reports. In contrast, legislators with outlying special interests and experts are given systematic access to drafting only consultation reports. The higher competition for co-decision versus consultation reports left unchecked by the formal EP rules has thus been exploited by party group leaders to promote group cohesion and coalition-building, producing clear winners and losers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most of the legislative tasks of the European Parliament (EP) are performed in its committees, it is controversial how representative they are of the overall plenary. Distributive, informational and partisan theories suggest respectively that the committee assignments system is designed to (1) serve special interests outside the EP, (2) bring informational benefits to the plenary or (3) promote partisan interests. These propositions are examined via a representative sample of committees using an original data set of MEPs' profiles in the 6th European Parliament. The results show that, whereas information-driven committees attract mainly MEPs with relevant expertise, homogeneous special interests influence assignments to interest-driven and mixed committees, turning them into preference outlying committees. However, partisan considerations do not appear to influence individual assignments strategically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]