An Analysis of Legislative Assistance in the European Parliament

The dissertation ‘An Analysis of Legislative Assistance in the EP’ treats the problem of unelected parliamentary officials, which assist the elected members in the EP. The main research question is how does the organisational form of legislative assistance affect the functioning of the EP. The dissertation contributes to a new area of research in legislative studies on the relationship between technocracy and democracy. To gain an insight into the research question, the dissertation is concerned with the institutional design of legislative assistance in two different ways. First, the research project explains the form of legislative assistance in the EP between 1952 and 2013. Second, the dissertation investigates the behavioural consequences (i.e. staff’s frequency of involvement in assistance) of the administrative form in the seventh term (2009-2014). Following these aims, the dissertation is divided into two empirical parts. The qualitative part explains the form of legislative assistance in the EP based on new-institutionalists approaches to organisational design and qualitative methods (content analysis of interview and secondary data). The quantitative part investigates how the form of legislative assistance affects the behaviour of staff based on organisation theory and quantitative methods (PCA/regression). A comparison with the national legislatures reveals that in most aspects the organisation of legislative assistance in the EP resembles the one in state-parliaments, while other aspects are exclusive to the EP. State-parliament characteristics were adopted already in the 1950s due to functional-ideational considerations. Changes were more dynamic in the 1960s/1970s compared to the 1980s/1990s. Until the 1980s, the administrative structures of the EP were responding to political events. Organisational structures significantly determine the frequency staff assist MEPs. To sum up, while the behaviour of staff is conditioned by the organisation of legislative assistance, the organisation itself is conditioned by the historical institutional environment and functional considerations of the EP.