EU parliaments in a post-constitutionalising stage: competitors or allies?

More than a decade has passed since the Lisbon Treaty explicated two channels of democratic representation in the European Union (EU): one directly through the European Parliament (EP) and one indirectly through national parliaments. This review article uses a wave of recent case studies to analyse how relations between national parliaments and the EP have evolved in practice in the post-Lisbon period. We develop a conceptual framework of the organisation of inter-parliamentary relations that sets them between patterns of intensive, coordinated action and areas of competition among the involved parliaments. We use the recent case studies to identify the dynamics in different EU policy fields and to assess some first expectations about the factors that drive the variation between them