There is an on-going debate in the literature as to whether national parliaments can and actually do play an active role in EU policy-making. The main reason for this persistent disagreement is based on the lack of comparative empirical data on parliamentary behaviour in EU affairs. The article aims to contribute to this debate by presenting the first comparative quantitative data on European affairs activities of national parliaments and by explaining the empirical variation. The development of a unique dataset including all 27 national parliaments allows us to test a series of explanatory variables for the level of parliamentary activity both at the committee and at the plenary level. Our analysis shows that institutional strength in EU affairs plays an important role. Overall, however, EU activities can be better explained with a mix of institutional capacities and motivational incentives. The specific combinations vary for different types of activities.

The evolution of the inter-institutional balance of powers has been a constant feature of the European integration process. Therefore, this thematic issue reopens these theoretical and empirical discussions by looking at an underexploited angle of research, namely the impact of rule change on policy outputs. We offer a discussion on how to theorise rule change, actors’ behaviour, and their impact on policy outputs. We also examine the links between theory and methods, noting the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for the study of institutional and policy change. We draw on the contributions of this thematic issue to delineate further paths to push forward the current frontiers in EU decision-making research.

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The Lisbon Treaty emphasized the importance of subsidiarity control in relation to the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The article demonstrates that the types of reasoning national parliaments use to raise subsidiarity objections in the AFSJ depend less on the institutional strength of national parliaments in EU affairs and more on the institutional evolution and material scope of EU proposals. Relying on the AFSJ case, the article shows that national parliaments use a narrow legal interpretation of subsidiarity when the EU legislation threatens Member States' legal traditions and State powers. However, concerns about the respect of national legal diversity are replaced by a more political approach to subsidiarity control when politically sensitive and contentious issues are at stake.

The article presents a dataset on the legislative procedure in European Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and a new method of data processeing. The dataset contains information on 529 procedures proposed between January 1998 and December 2017. For each of the legislative proposals, the dataset identifies the main elements of the legislative procedure (e.g., dates, types of procedure, directory codes and subcodes, actors, voting results, amendments, legal basis, etc.) and the changes introduced at each step of the legislative process from the text proposed by the European Commission to the final version published in the <em>Official Journal of the European Union</em>. This information has been gathered using text mining techniques. The dataset is relevant for a broad range of research questions regarding the EU decision-making process in JHA related to the balance of powers between European institutional actors and their capacity to influence the legislative outputs.