ABSTRACT
In recent years, scholars have focused increasing attention on the nature of European institutions and their impact on those of member states. Scholars concerned in particular with the structure of EU governance tend to disagree over whether the EU is best elucidated as a collection of unitary states (Taylor 1991; Moravscik 1991; Garrett 1992) or as a quasi-federal state (Sbragia 1993:28). Among those who consider the EU as a quasi-federal governance structure, most tend to describe a ‘dynamic confusion of powers’ (Schmidt 1997a) instead of the traditional separation of powers of federal systems, with the legislative function more the domain of the formal executive than the directly-elected legislature; the executive function more the purview of the Commission bureaucracy than the formal executive to which it reports (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 1995; Nugent 1995); and the judicial function encroaching on the executive and the legislative in its judiciary activism (Wincott 1995; Weiler 1991).
