Assessing the European Parliament's Power of the Purse: Rights, Capabilities and Strategies

The European Parliament (EP) underwent an astonishing development. It turned from an assembly with purely consultative powers into a directly-elected supranational parliament with true co-legislative competences in virtually all policy areas. Yet there seems one exception to this trajectory of “unrelenting rise”: the EU budget. Taking as starting point the Lisbon changes, this paper identifies three categories of determinants of the EP’s actual powers of the purse: rights, capabilities and strategies. Analyzing the parallel negotiations on the Multiannual Financial Framework 2014-2020 and the 2014 budget it is shown that formal rights alone do not entirely determine the EP’s de facto powers of the purse. Depending upon which value the other relevant factors assume, we might see more parliamentary influence in budgetary matters—even under the current rules of the game. The budget thus represents indeed an exception to the general trend of ever greater EP empowerment—but current low levels of EP influence are not cast in stone.