The methodology of Comitology research regarding its impact on shaping the European Union’s ław

Abstract

The article presents methodological theories, application of which, when adopting the political and legal research perspective, makes it possible to analyse the impact of comitology on the shape of law adopted in the European Union. The author assumes that in consideration of equally complex decision-making centers as comitology committees, whose structural element is their location between two levels – the Community and the national level, it is impossible to limit to only one research method. The purpose of the article is an attempt to demonstrate that the most reasonable approach to comitology research is to use institutional and legal analysis, which is based on theoretical assumptions combining political and legal sciences and to supplement it to explain phenomena occurring within the comitology committees by applying the assumptions of the theory PAT (Principal–Agent Theory), the Scharpf’s theory of legitimacy of power, Wessels’s fusion theory and analysis of empirical data. This approach is designed to enable the examination of normative acts, in which legal basis of functioning of the comitology institutions (i.e. the EU founding treaties, comitology regulations and judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union), as well as to highlight a number of issues relevant to the practical aspect of the functioning of comitology committees.

Keywords

• comitology
• committee procedures
• delegation of power in the European Union
• legal system of the European Union
• principle of inter-institutional balance