The Formation of Compromises at the European Parliament and the US House of representatives

This paper focuses on compromise building in the European Parliament and the US House of Representatives. For a long time, the European Parliament and the US House were described as compromise Legislatures. However, the two Legislatures offer nowadays very distinct evolutions. Thanks to concrete examples, this contribution intends to describe the concrete mechanisms and their evolutions that fuel trans-partisan compromises. Beyond this description, this paper analyzes the effects of these practices on the content of public policies. To what extent and how these practices contribute to alter the content of debated public policies? The comparative method shows that the different types of compromises arising from the individual or collective discussions are crucial to understand both the political and technical content of laws.