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European Centre @ POLIS

Department of Politics and International Studies
 

OPAL Project

Observatory of Parliaments after the Lisbon Treaty (OPAL) is a three-year project, which constitutes a collaborative endeavour by the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Paris) and the Universities of Cambridge, Cologne and Maastricht. OPAL is the first major project to address the role of national parliaments in European integration after the Treaty of Lisbon and in light of the financial and Eurozone crises. It looks in particular at how the institutional reforms and new legal stipulations arising from the Lisbon Treaty impact on the role of national parliaments in EU affairs in practice. Over the past two and a half years OPAL researchers have gathered comprehensive data on parliamentary involvement in EU affairs across all 28 Member States. They have carried out in-depth research on the parliamentary scrutiny of EU legislative processes, parliamentary involvement in non-legislative EU policy processes, inter-parliamentary co-operation and contacts to EU institutions as well as on parliamentary infrastructure in EU affairs. In the context of the Eurozone crisis OPAL has also thoroughly treated on the role of national parliaments and the European Parliament in the new economic governance arrangements in the Eurozone and EU-28.

The outcomes of the project are presented on an on-going basis in form of a series of on-line papers published on the OPAL websites as well as conference papers, articles and books by various members of the OPAL team, ideally individually or jointly.

The project will also result in two significant collective publications:

-          National Parliaments in the EU: The Performance of Multilevel Democracy in Europe (Special Issue of West European Politics due to be published in 2015)

-          Palgrave Handbook on National Parliaments and the European Union (due to be published in late 2014)