The empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) has been object of numerous researches within the European studies and legislative analysis. Nonetheless, the role that organization of the parliamentary work has played in this evolution remain largely understudied, very few studies have focused on the EP rules and their internal consequences.
The purpose of this study is to help fill this gap by describing and explaining, first of all, how the various stages in the empowerment of the EP and the EEC/EC/EU expansions or "membership shocks" (1973, 1981, 1986, 1995, and 2004) affected the EP''s organizational structure and its internal Rules of Procedure (RoP). Secondly, if we consider parliaments not only as rule- following institutions but also as resource- based organizations (i.e. Staff, financial resources), it seems interesting to investigate if and how the distribution of organizational resources within the EP can increase or counterbalance positional advantages of majority parties within it. The central research questions of this paper will be the following: What rights di individual MEPs and minority groups have in EP? Why and how these rights change over time? This paper answers these questions by using concepts and measures drawn from organizational theory. While other studies have applied concepts and hypotheses from organizational theory to national legislatures such an approach has never been used to analyze the EP.
