Passage to bicameralism: Lisbon’s ordinary legislative procedure at ten

Abstract

In the system of multilevel democracy emerging from the Lisbon Treaty, the ordinary legislative procedure (OLP) embodies the idea that it is possible to have democratic law-making in a polity characterized by a plurality of organized demoi. This article takes stock of this idea by examining what role democratic aspirations played in the invention of the OLP and how this procedure has affected EU policy-making processes, legislative outputs, and political participation in critical new areas of market regulation. Though the OLP is no silver bullet for EU democracy, it embeds the EU policy-making process in a rule-based logic. Its democratic effects are intimately bound up with the evolving institutions of the so-called legislative trilogues.