How to Parliamentarise the European Parliament?

This paper will connect my research Max Weber’s ‘parliamentary’ theory of knowledge and the Westminster procedural tracts as historical approximations for the parliamentary ideal type of politics. Using the Weberian principle of einseitige Steigerung of ideal types, I speculate in the paper with the different routes to parliamentarisation of the European Parliament. Besides the already widely discussed and partly realised 1) political responsibility of the commission to the parliament I discuss three procedural means of parliamentary control of government and administration. They are 2) the introduction of motions and bills to the plenum and making their first reading there to precede the committee stage, 3) strengthening the parliamentary sovereignty by excluding the commission’s and the council’s interventions into the ongoing debates of the EP and 4) strengthening the EP:s parliamentary oversight of the commission’s and the member states’ bureaucracy along the lines proposed by Weber in 1918.