Who Decides and How?

This book explains how individual members of the European Parliament (EP) make decisions on the wide variety of policy proposals they routinely confront. In the absence of adequate resources to make equally informed decisions across policy areas, legislators adopt the positions of their party's policy experts, under the assumption that these experts share their preferences over policy outcomes. This results in cohesive parties, despite the inability of EP parties to discipline their members. The book sheds new light on the inner workings of the EP by investigating both political processes and outcomes, relying on the respective strengths of both quantitative and qualitative data and methods. It shows how legislators delegate decision-making authority to expert colleagues without sacrificing the representativeness of policy decisions and outcomes.