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The European Parliament is the first of the Union institutions listed in Article 13(1) TEU. As an ‘institution’, it enjoys a certain number of rights, prerogatives, and privileges, and is subject to a certain number of obligations. Thus, for example, in its decision-making, Parliament must ‘promote the Union’s values, advance its objectives, serve its interests and those of its citizens and … Member States’; it must also ‘ensure constant respect for the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality’, ‘act within the limits of the powers conferred on it in the Treaties’, and comply with any international agreements concluded by the Union. It must maintain a dialogue with civil society, conduct its work as openly as possible, grant citizens a right of access to documents it holds, and protect the personal data of individuals in its procession. Parliament may participate as of right in most types of proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and enjoys legal capacity in the Member States in respect of matters concerning its own functioning. It is also subject to the auditing authority of the Court of Auditors and the jurisdiction of the European Ombudsman as regards allegations or investigations of maladministration. More

The evolution of EU legislation and its legislative procedures can be seen as a reflection of the development of European integration from an administrative regime to a constitutional system more generally. The Coal and Steel Community of 1951 was to perform its functions with actors, legal instruments, and procedures for their adoption, which, despite their supranational nature, were inspired by national notions of administrative law. The idea that a representative and democratically accountable institution would adopt binding legal acts for its citizens seemed at this stage far-fetched. Even though the European Community Treaty of 1957, owing to its more broadly framed policies, envisaged an increased law-making activity, the dominance of executive actors (Commission and Council) in the adoption of legal acts with little or no input from the European Assembly was not conducive to an assessment of such acts as comparable to national legislation. On the other hand, it could not be argued that such acts were typically administrative either. Their normative content made them more comparable to national executive laws.

Policy coordination in one form or another has been a feature of EU governance for the past two decades. Developing initially as a mechanism through which to coordinate national economic policies in the shadow of economic and monetary union (EMU), and extending to the coordination of employment policies through the European Employment Strategy, by the 2000s, policy coordination was being heralded as a new form of governance to be deployed to achieve the aims of the Lisbon Strategy of economic and social reform. Indeed, such was the interest in this new form of EU governance, it even acquired its own distinctive nomenclature—the ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC).