Presentation

Europolix: The Observatory of European Institutions (OIE)              

The institutions of the European Union play an essential role in European integration by producing decisions and public policies, as well as ensuring their implementation within the Member States. However, EU citizens, and even scholars, are not fully aware of how EU institutions actually operate.

In order to better understand how the core of this atypical political system functions, the Centre d’études européennes at Sciences Po Paris launched the Observatory of European Institutions (OIE) in 2006, with the support of the Centre for Socio-Political Data at Sciences Po (CDSP).

Its primary objective is to study the European decision-making process in detail through the creation of a database on European institutions, which comprehensively accounts for how the EU institutions operate and interact. By systematically and conclusively tracking both intra and inter institutional activity, the OIE aspires to overcome fragmentary approaches regarding the study of EU institutions while testing manifold hypotheses using variables that design EU decision-making. Given its methodology and capacious coverage of subject matter, the OIE constitutes an ambitious, large-scale and long term research project.

Opposition level of the member states. OIE data