A House Divided against Itself. The Intra-institutional Conflict about the Powers of the European Parliament

Many authors suggest that MEPs seek to extend the power of the EP in their daily parliamentary work. A central assumption in this literature is that the EP is a unitary actor that desires more power for itself. In other words, scholars assume that the conflict over the power of the EP is inter-institutional and not intra-institutional. In this article we seek to test this idea. Informed by the history of the parliamentarization of Europe's national parliaments, we argue that the conflict about the power of the EP is likely to have an intra-institutional component. An empirical analysis of voting in the EP supports this notion. We find that the question of how much power the EP should have is as important as the question of how much power the EU should have in understanding how MEPs vote.