This book provides a comprehensive account of national parliaments' adaptation to European integration. Advancing an explanation based on political parties' constitutional preferences, the volume investigates the nature and variation of parliamentary rights in European Union affairs across countries and levels of governance. In some member states, parliaments have traditionally been strong and parties hold intergovernmental visions of European integration. In these countries, strong parliamentary rights emerge in the context of parties' efforts to realise their preferred constitutional design for the European polity. Parliamentary rights remain weakly developed where federally-oriented parties prevail, and where parliaments have long been marginal arenas in domestic politics. Moreover, divergent constitutional preferences underlie inter-parliamentary disagreement on national parliaments' collective rights at the European level. Constitutional preferences are key to understanding why a 'Senate' of national parliaments never enjoyed support and why the alternatives subsequently put into place have stayed clear of committing national parliaments to any common policies. This volume calls into question existing explanations that focus on strategic partisan incentives arising from minority and coalition government. It, furthermore rejects the exclusive attribution of parliamentary 'deficits' to the structural constraints created by European integration and, instead, restores a sense of accountability for parliamentary rights to political parties and their ideas for the European Union's constitutional design.

Advancing an explanation based on political parties' constitutional preferences, this volume investigates the nature and variation of parliamentary rights in European Union affairs across countries and levels of governance.

Assesses what we know - and do not know - about comparative constitutional design and particular institutional choices concerning executive power and other issues.

"First [originally] published in Great Britain in 2007 by Politico's Publishing ..."--Title page verso.

Examines constitutional change in Latin America from 1900 to 2008 and provides the first systematic explanation of the origins of constitutional designs.

George Tsebelis’ veto players approach has become a prominent theory to analyze various research questions in political science. Studies that apply veto player theory deal with the impact of institutions and partisan preferences of legislative activity and policy outcomes. It is used to measure the degree of policy change and, thus, reform capacity in national and international political systems. This volume contains the analysis of leading scholars in the field on these topics and more recent developments regarding theoretical and empirical progress in the area of political reform-making. The contributions come from research areas of political science where veto player theory plays a significant role, including, positive political theory, legislative behavior and legislative decision-making in national and supra-national political systems, policy making and government formation. The contributors to this book add to the current scholarly and public debate on the role of veto players, making it of interest to scholars in political science and policy studies as well as policymakers worldwide.