Why yet another textbook on EU politics? And why in a series on comparative politics? For us, the answers to these two questions are closely linked. Having taught EU politics for several years, both of us grew increasingly dissatisfied with the introductory texts on EU politics available on the market. Our dissatisfaction stemmed from two facts. First, existing textbooks on EU politics tend to be too descriptive for our liking. Vast parts of those texts are devoted to discussing the details of the EU's institutional set-up or the intricacies of EU decision-making procedures. By contrast, we are more interested in the political processes that take place within the EU. Knowledge of the EU's institutions and procedures is necessary in order to study those processes fruitfully, but our objective in teaching EU politics is to give students an understanding of how politics in the EU works, not of the EU's institutions and procedures per se. Second, most textbooks still look at the EU as a ‘one-of-a-kind’ system or, as it is commonly put in the EU studies literature, as an organization ‘sui generis’. The focus on the EU's uniqueness makes it difficult for students to relate their understanding of EU politics to what they know about other political systems. We believe that, increasingly, the EU can best be studied from a comparative politics perspective, and that this should form the leading premise of a textbook on EU politics.