The paper explores newspapers' portrayals of the European Parliament and national parliaments (NPs) in European Union (EU) affairs. To understand underlying perceptions of journalists, it takes public parliamentary activities and looks at their influence on parliaments' news visibility in Finland, Germany and the UK in routine periods in 2011 and 2012. This is done against the background that parliaments, regarded as ultimate legitimisers of state power, depend on the mass media to reach their citizenry. However, journalists follow their own agenda in publishing parliamentary news. In this regard, they may highlight the complementarity, competition or cooperation of parliaments in the EU's unique multi-tier environment. Overall, our results suggest that NPs correspond stronger with newsmakers' anticipation of readership interest. In addition, findings seem to support the assumption that parliaments in the EU are mostly perceived as complementary, separate legislative branches in EU decision-making.

In the context of the 2004 Enlargement, several EU governments reformed their social legislation to restrict the access to benefits of job-seeking or inactive EU citizens. Many of these restrictions were in tension with the case-law of the European Court of Justice, but when it came to judge their compatibility with EU law, the ECJ was more lenient than many anticipated. This article analyses this shift in ECJ case-law by looking at the dialogue between the Court and national authorities against the backdrop of EU legislative reform. It demonstrates that Member States contributed to the evolution of case-law by 'pushing the boundaries' of EU law both domestically and before the Court. It shows in particular how closely the arguments presented before the Court by national judiciaries or governments correlate with the new interpretations adopted by the Court itself. This is illustrated with empirical evidence from the UK and Germany.

This research investigates the policy narratives that were deployed by the Commission to justify the reform of Cohesion policy in relation to the long-standing process of EMU reform. Our aim is to find out how narratives about EU solidarity allowed the creation of both redistributive patterns among the Member States, and Cohesion policy's macroeconomic conditionality. We identified two narratives: one of EU solidarity, based on the 'harmonious development' of the territories, and one of EMU stability, consisting in cross-national solidarity in exchange for structural reforms. We argue that, in the context of EMU reform, the narrative of stability found a favourable interest constellation, becoming the ideational driver of the Cohesion policy reform. In order to prove this argument, we conducted an ideational process tracing on the 1988 and 1994 Cohesion policy reforms, as well as a frame analysis on a corpus of 74 speeches from relevant EU Commission policy actors.