Majority rule has never officially existed in the European Parliament as there has never, to-date, been a party group that holds a majority of seats. Although this is a common occurrence in many parliamentary systems, the Parliament’s organization is complicated further by the fact that there is neither a government nor an opposition. The combination of these two realities means that the procedural rights of individuals and party groups in the European Parliament are different from more established parliamentary systems. This poses considerable challenges to existing theories of legislative organization, and particularly to those of legislative agenda-setting. How is legislation prioritized in lieu of either a majority or governing party? Are MEPs all afforded equal rights with regard to the plenary agenda? What impact does the institutional set-up have on party groups’ legislative success rates? This paper proposes a modified version of Cox and McCubbins’ (2005) Cartel Agenda Model to help explain how institutional structures can privilege some actors at certain times, and other actors at other times. In particular, it shows that the ability to control the legislative agenda is dependent on the ideological and policy positioning of party groups in different issue areas. The analysis focuses on the previously ignored, yet crucially important, Conference of Presidents – a council made of party group leaders that have control over the legislative agenda. A quantitative analysis of the European Parliament roll-call dataset, as well as an original database of proposal delay in the Parliament, shows that the institutional set-up of the Parliament’s rules of procedure means that it is the median party on any given policy dimension that holds agenda-setting powers.
