The European Parliament Administration: Organizational Structure and Behavioral Implications

Abstract

Administrative personnel are present not only within political executives but also within legislative bodies. There are indications that the staff of parliamentary assemblies have grown and become prof essionalized, thus making parliaments less dependent upon the expertise and administrative capacity of the executive (see below). Officials within parliaments, however, seem to have got marginal scholarly attention (see Dobbels and Neuhold in this volume): scholars interested in parliaments have traditionally focused on the parliamentarians themselves, and those specializing in bureaucracies tend to concentrate on the executive branch, thus leaving parliament administrations in a ‘no-man’s land’ in the literature. This lack of knowledge regarding parliaments’ staff also holds for the European Parliament (EP) (Hix et al., 2003), which contains a considerable administration, both in the form of the EP secretariat and in the form of the secretariats of the various political groups. Three clusters of research on parliamentary bureaucracy may be envisaged, of which this chapter focuses on the first one. This first research question concerns the behavior of parliamentary staff and the extent to which it is systematically shaped by their organizational location. As discussed more thoroughly in the conclusion, the second and third potential research questions focus on the power of parliamentary bureaucracy vis-à-vis members of parliament and on the extent to which the administrative resources of members of parliament enable them to exert influence on inter-institutional relations.