The picture of Brussels-based bureaucrats exercising arbitrary executive powers is one of the favourite images conjured by Eurosceptics across the political spectrum. This book offers a richer understanding of the nature of the EU's powers, how they relate to national governments, and how they are controlled.

The Council of Ministers provides a comprehensive analysis of the Council of Ministers: how it works, its varied activities, functions, and its relationships with the other key EU institutions and the member states. It is a key legislative institution which lies at the fulcrum of decision-making in the European Union.

The picture of Brussels-based bureaucrats exercising arbitrary executive powers is one of the favourite images conjured by Eurosceptics across the political spectrum. This book offers a richer understanding of the nature of the EU's powers, how they relate to national governments, and how they are controlled.

This book provides an up-to-date interdisciplinary assessment of the accountability of executive power in different European States and at the European Union level. From a legal perspective, it wonders to what extent the forms of responsibility and accountability of executive power have evolved in terms of legal technique or framework. From a historical perspective, it looks at the evolution of responsibility paradigms. From a political science perspective, it examines responsibility and the expectations of European democracies in terms of authority and efficiency. The volume also has a quantitative aspect identifying, gathering and analysing statistical material on responsibility and accountability in current political regimes. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and policy-makers in constitutional law and politics, public law, comparative law, comparative politics, legal history and government.

The increase in the European Union's executive powers in the areas of economic and financial governance has thrown into sharp relief the challenges of EU law in constituting, framing, and constraining the decision-making processes and political choices that have hitherto supported European integration. The constitutional implications of crisis-induced transformations have been much debated but have largely overlooked the tension between law and discretion that the post-2010 reforms have brought to the fore. This book focuses on this tension and explores the ways in which legal norms may (or may not) constrain and structure the discretion of the EU executive. The developments in the EU's post-crisis financial and economic governance act as a reference point from which to analyze the normative problems pertaining to the law's relationship to the exercise of discretion. Structured in three parts, the book starts by analyzing the challenges to the maxim that the law both grounds and constrains EU executive and administrative discretion, setting out the concepts, problems and approaches to the relation between law and discretion both in general public law and in EU law. It progresses to analyze how these problems and approaches have unfolded in EU's financial, economic and monetary governance. Finally, it moves on from these specific developments to assess how existing legal principles and means of judicial review contribute to ensuring the rationality and legality of EU's discretionary powers.

Every year the EU Commission issues thousands of rules based on powers delegated by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. But delegation is carefully controlled. Traditionally, control has been exerted through a system of committees of member state representatives ('comitology'). However, this system was contested by the European Parliament which was left without any influence. The Lisbon Treaty introduced a new control regime for delegated powers, the so-called delegated acts system, which was meant to supplement the existing system. The new system involves direct control by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament and thus for the first time gave the European Parliament real influence over delegated powers. However, the choice over which delegation regime to use in practice has turned into one of the most vehement institutional conflicts in the EU political system. This book represents the first comprehensive investigation of this conflict. It does so by a combination of methods and data, including process-tracing of the introduction of the new system in the Lisbon Treaty, case studies of selected post-Lisbon delegation situations, and statistical analysis of datasets comprising hundreds of post-Lisbon legislative files.