This article on the LSE European Politics blog examines the proposition that the accession of Eastern Europe, post soviet states led to a decision sclerosis in the European Union. One of Dimiter Toshkov’s analytic tools examines the average speed of decisions taken as well as analysing the number of times each country votes “No” and wins. I also like his charting techniques.
The issue of delay reminded me of the time I looked at votes/MEP and the amount of time an MEP might get in Parliament. I was exploring increasing the size of the Parliament …. but doing so at the scale I was considering would have an adverse impact on the time each MEP might get to speak. This implies the need to deploy a parallelism by having more committees and commissions that can meet at the same time. There’s probably a limit to the size of a representative assembly but it isn’t the 400-700 that seems popular in the western democracies, many Union conferences are much larger and meet less frequently.