A supranational alliance: the empowerment of the European Commission (1958–2019)

Despite severe ruptures, international cooperation remains an integral part of the response to new challenges facing European countries. Nothing better illustrates this than the continued empowerment of the European Commission. A set of legislative games of empowerment is developed to show that this process rests on a supranational alliance between the European Commission and the European Parliament, grounded in both structural and political factors. This novel expectation is tested using nearly the entire corpus of legislative production from 1958 to 2019 (more than 9,000 regulations and directives). The findings show that parliamentary involvement in the legislative process is the strongest driver of Commission empowerment, and its effect increases when the Parliament is ideologically closer to the Commission than the Council. How the European Union resolves this ‘federalism question’ has important implications for its legitimacy.