Conceptions of Parliament

In both common and academic language, representative, legislative and deliberative assemblies are equally called parliaments. The concepts refer, however, to completely different ideal types of political assemblies, and it would be heuristically important to present these ideal types in their ein- seitige Steigerung (Weber 1904, 191) before applying them to the actual parliamentary assemblies. The three ideal types of parliamentary assemblies are presented and some aspects contrasting them are summed up in the following Table 4.3.

It is possible to apply this triad to the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure. While direct elections since 1979 have served to strengthen the EP’s representative powers and treaties since Maastricht have strengthened its legislative powers, it is the EP’s rules of debate that, despite the effect of the Francophone procedural tradition, form its deliberative core. The reading will focus on both the presence of the rules and the political conflicts between them, with the one-sided focus on the chances of strengthening their deliberative character. The background to this is the book The Politics of Parliamentary Procedure (Palonen 2014c).

Here selected aspects of the European Parliament’s power shares (Machtanteile for Weber) will be discussed from the perspective of the conceptual history of its rules of procedure—Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament, 8th Parliamentary Term, July 2014. The topics of discussion are the status and powers of the EP’s president, the parliamentary agenda-setting, the rights of the members, the control of parliamentary time as well as the intervention of the Commission and the Council into the EP’s internal procedures.

Table 4.3 Three ideal types of parliamentary assemblies