ABSTRACT
We present a unified model of the politics of the European Union (EU). We focus on the effects of the EU's changing treaty base-from the founding Rome Treaty (ratified in 1958) to the Single European Act (SEA, 1987), the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (1993), and the Amsterdam Treaty (1999)-on the relations among its three supranational institutions-the Commission of the European Communities, the European Court of Justice, and the European Parliament-and between these actors and the intergovernmental Council of Ministers. We conceive of these institutions in terms of the roles they perform in the three core functions of the modem state: to legislate and formulate policy (legislative branch), to administer and implement policy (executive branch), and to interpret policy and adjudicate disputes (judicial branch).
