He joined the Secretariat of the European Parliament in 1981 and was then part of several committees in both EU and British political institutions. During 1990 and 1991 he was a Visiting European Community Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and from 1994 to 1999 he was a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. Since 1999 he has been a Visiting Practitioner Fellow at Sussex University.

In this first edition of the Jean Monnet Lecture Series in 2019/2020, Prof. Shackleton presents his new book on ‘Shaping Parliamentary Democracy’. The book analyses nearly 100 original interviews with Members of the European Parliament from across the European Union who were active between 1979 and 2019. The interviews capture the memories of the MEPs about their own roles and their assessment of what the parliament achieved in developing a European parliamentary democracy in the forty years following the first direct elections.

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