Charlotte Burns (2004) sets out how the influence and role of the Commission changed when in 1993 the co-decision procedure came into force and a third reading for the EP was introduced. Earlier research has covered the impact of this newly introduced legislative procedure on the relationship between the Parliament and the Council. However, the Commission’ s role has hardly been discussed. Therefore, Burns felt the need to study “the role and behaviour of the Commission” in order to “redress the current imbalance in the literature” (2002, p.1). This can be understood as the research problem. Previous studies have shown that the Commission influence has declined under the co-decision procedure. However, Burns notes that these previous studies do not pay enough attention to the Commission’ s gate-keeping and agenda-setting role. The existing literature agreed that the Commission’ s formal role has been diminished by the introduction of co-decision. However, Burns recognizes several deficiencies in the previous studies. She argues that the arguments of inter alia Crombez, Tsebelis and Garret “rest upon a poor understanding of the decision-making process and should therefore be treated with caution” (p.5). In the first part of the paper, she thoroughly describes different literature on co-decision. In the second part, she goes further into previous studies, with which she partly agrees that indeed evidence can be found that the Commission’ s influence weakened formally. In the third part, she shows with the novel food case that the Commission is still able to influence the decision-making process informally. The study is of great significance because it “provides a more nuanced and empirically accurate portrayal of the Commission’ legislative influence” (p.2). It thereby fills the gap in the existing literature about the co-decision procedure and proves that the Commission has great influence in the decision-making process. Therefore, the purpose statement of the study is to “shed light on an under-researched aspect of the co-decision procedure by presenting an empirical case study” (Burns, 2002, p.15). She already suggested something like this in the introduction. However, it became only clear in the conclusion. This can be confusing for the reader. Section II: Methodology - How do we get to know what we want to know? The basic design is how the study has been set up. It is not explicitly stated. However, one can see that she presents a detailed empirical case in combination with data from intervie