Documents EU Parliament 84 results

"With the European Parliament comprising politicians from many different countries, cultures, languages, national parties and institutional backgrounds, one might expect politics in the Parliament to be highly-fragmented and unpredictable. By studying more than 12,000 recorded votes between 1979 and 2004 this 2007 book establishes that the opposite is in fact true: transnational parties in the European Parliament are highly cohesive and the classic 'left-right' dimension dominates voting behaviour. Furthermore, the cohesion of parties in the European Parliament has increased as the powers of the Parliament have increased. The authors suggest that the main reason for these developments is that like-minded MEPs have incentives to form stable transnational party organizations and to use these organizations to compete over European Union policies. They suggest that this is a positive development for the future of democratic accountability in the European Union."

"Over the past 50 years, the European Union has come to exert an increasingly significant impact on most areas of significance for trade unions, including social policy, industrial relations and labour legislation. This integration process has gone hand in hand with a constant increase in the powers of the European institutions. The aim of this paper is to investigate the current relationship between the European Parliament and the European trade unions and to point out the main tasks and challenges from the trade union point of view. "