Committee coordinators face a classic delegation problem when assigning reports to their committee members. Although a few theoretical developments have focused on the effects of expertise on delegation, empirical studies have commonly assumed monotonic effects. Based on existing informational models, we argue that a more loyal committee member, everything else being equal, is more likely to be appointed as a rapporteur and that more expertise, holding preference divergence constant, has a non-monotonic effect because of informational credibility. Employing accumulated committee service as an expertise measure, these theoretical expectations are tested on all committee report delegations in the European Parliament from 1979 to 2014. Our empirical analysis with non-parametric and parametric hierarchical conditional logit models renders strong support for these expectations. The results hold across member states, political groups, procedures, committees and over time.

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Does the President of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) make strategic use of his members? Cases in the CJEU are prepared by a "judge-rapporteur" who acts as an agenda setter. I argue that the President builds the Court's legitimacy by strategically allocating cases to select judges.Using original data on 9623 case allocations , I argue that suspicions about judges' political accountability can polarize already politicized debates. The President circumvents such dynamics by appointing a rapporteur whose government holds moderate political preferences. However, he considers governmental preferences and disagreements mainly when case law is not yet developed. This may also contribute to explaining judges' individual-level specialization, which arguably favors the construction of a coherent case law.

We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, candidate, member of parliament) and join them with external information. Currently, the data cover four elections (1999–2014). Among other aspects, the collection should facilitate research on the European Parliament's allegedly weak electoral connection. In this article, we outline the main features of the datasets, describe patterns of intra-party competition and preference voting and conduct exploratory analyses of individual-level changes in list positions.