Explaining the European Parliament’s Legislative Clout: The Individual-Level Determinants of EP Bargaining Success

This article investigates which factors shape the European Parliament’s (EP) bargaining success under the codecision procedure, focusing on three sets of predictors that operate at the levels of the rapporteur and the responsible EP committee: ideological distances to the Council of Ministers, qualifications of MEPs, and institutional factors. Our results indicate that greater ideological distance between EP delegates and the Council depresses bargaining success; that inter-institutional contestation becomes more focused on the left-right dimension over time; that several factors that one might expect to benefit EP bargaining success in fact show a negative correlation; and that rapporteur-level variables are the most important predictors during the 1999–2004 EP term, while committee-level predictors matter from 2004–2009 – a difference we ascribe to successively greater oversight of rapporteurs by their parent committees.