Since its post-Lisbon increase in (legislative and non-legislative)
powers, the European Parliament (EP) is more relevant than ever in
the geographically diversified multilevel system of the EU. Party group
coordinators occupy a crucial position in collective decision-making
within the EP. However, knowledge about these pivotal actors is absent.
This raises the question as to who these party group coordinators are,
what they do, and what indeed makes a good coordinator. A new
data set shows that in 2012, more than one-fifth of coordinators of
the three largest and most influential groups are German, with British
and Spanish coordinators ranking a distant second before Romanians.
Among coordinators from NMS, only one-eighth were newcomers