This article examines the role of the standing committees in building consensus within the European Parliament (EP) and asks whether the ability to fulfil this function has remained stable even in the context of enlarged membership after the

Simulations can be extremely successful in acquainting participants with a negotiation's logic and process, especially in those political systems in which negotiations are prominent, such as the European Union (EU). After a brief introduction on the simulations in teaching the European integration, in this article we present, step-by-step, a simulation game on the adoption of a real piece of European legislation: the regulation that implemented the European Citizens' Initiative, one of the main innovations of the Lisbon Treaty. Special attention is devoted to the different phases of a simulation design, from the choice of the topic, the choice and allocation of roles, the preparation of all the necessary documentation, to the debriefing and assessment phases. The article originates from a 4-year long study with undergraduate students from two Italian universities.

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Three years after the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, the paper asks what has changed in how the Council does business, and what significance enlargement may have had. It assesses how the Council has 'survived' the doubling of membership, and whether this survival has been accompanied by qualitative changes in the nature of Council work. The paper relies on original quantitative evidence and qualitative insights from interviews and case studies. The findings suggest that the Council has successfully assimilated the new members in its decisionmaking dynamics and has adapted its internal working methods to the new conditions. Yet some qualitative changes can be detected in the process, with the Council becoming more 'bureaucratised', as well as in the output, with legislation decreasing in importance and changing in substance. The role of enlargement as an explanatory factor for these changes remains nevertheless, problematic to pin down: there are many other sources of change in EU policies and processes; and there are very rarely coalitions of 'new' versus 'old' Member States, acceding countries generally joining issue-based coalitions in which larger Member States continue to play the leading role. The continuing dynamics of change appear to be more important in interinstitutional relations than inside the Council itself.