Although committees are deemed to be -in this century, as in the previous one -the 'legislative backbone' of legislatures, scholars have not devoted enough attention to how parliamentary committees cope with the challenge of the 'forced increased transparency' of their legislative activity, depending on the opportunity to use old and new media as channels of institutional communication with citizens. On the one hand, increased transparency could be an added value of their work. On the other hand, there is the risk that the wider disclosure of legislative committees' activity could undermine their ability to act as 'consensus-building' arenas, and thus affect their legislative capacity. The article argues that increasing levels of transparency can impair committees' lawmaking performance, so also undermining the lawmaking ability of their legislatures. In three very different legislatures (the US House of Representatives, the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the European Parliament), both in institutional architecture and committees' legislative powers, the growing transparency of their legislative activity has caused a shifting of the legislative decision-making away from committees or, even, outside the legislature.

European Commission – Monopoly on legislative initiative – Power to withdraw legislative proposals, as recognised and limited by the Court of Justice – Interinstitutional Agreement on Better Law-Making – European Parliament Rules of Procedure – Interinstitutional programming procedures – Technical and political usages of the withdrawal – Question of confidence in national parliamentary systems – National Parliaments and Early Warning System – Parliamentarisation of the decision to withdraw – Principle of institutional balance

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In the last few years, the European integration process has increasingly resorted to flexible mechanisms of co-operation and decision-making, involving only a limited number of European Union (EU) Member States. The economic and financial crisis itself -and above all the response of the EU to the crisis -has undoubtedly favoured the trend.These ongoing asymmetric mechanisms deeply challenge the supranational architecture upon which the EU experience is based, determining a major change in the formal role and powers of both the European and national institutions. In particular, the European Parliament is incapable of adapting its internal functioning to the asymmetric schemes. In order to contrast these trends, some hypotheses of reform have been formulated, aiming either at building a new institution, a sort of Euro-Parliament; or at adapting the internal organisation of the EP to ongoing asymmetric tendencies limiting the voting rights of EPs.The essay challenges both these hypothesis, assuming that responding to the increasing asymmetries of the EU by making the existing institutions, above all the European Parliament, more asymmetric, would consistently endanger the cohesion of the Union and threaten the good functioning of its governing bodies. Rather, the approach should be based upon a re-consideration of the overall representative circuit upon which the EU is based. This implies that an even more asymmetric EU will have to rely on its traditional channels of parliamentary representation: what will need to change is not related to the nature or the format of parliamentary representation, but rather to its operative patterns, which should count on strengthened cooperation among parliaments in order to accommodate asymmetric tendencies in the EU governance with flexible forms of interaction in the scrutiny of such procedures.

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