Bending the rules: Arrangements for sharing technical and political information between the EU institutions

The European Union is typically modelled as a separation of powers system. Within this context, this article focuses on the exchange of technical and political information on policy-making between the EU institutions. Even though only very few formal rules are specified in the treaties and in legislation, the institutions, and mainly the European Parliament, have improved their institutional position through creative interpretation of these formal rules, resulting in a set of codified quasi-formal rules coupled with the institutions' political rights. This article presents a comprehensive overview of this and demonstrates that the quasi-formal rules give the European Parliament a privileged position across the policy process, which for the greater part is not matched by the Council. The political power of the inter-institutional information regime has made the European Union parliamentarise by stealth.