The Inter-Institutional Distribution of Power in EU Codecision

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act strategically. Predicted bargaining outcomes of the crucial Conciliation stage of codecision are shown to be strongly biased towards the legislative status quo. Making symmetric preference assumptions for members of CM and EP, CM is on average much more conservative because of its internal qualified majority rule. This makes CM by an order of magnitude more influential than EP, in contrast to a seeming formal parity between the two ‘co-legislators’.power measurement, European Union codecision procedure, bargaining, spatial voting, decision procedures

Politicizing Council decision-making: The effect of EP empowerment

Research on the intra-institutional consequences of differences in the EU’s inter-institutional rule configurations is rare. This study investigates the effect of the empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) on the active involvement of ministers in Council decision-making. I argue that the empowerment of the EP increases the incentives for bureaucrats in the Council’s preparatory bodies to refer decisions on legislative dossiers to ministers. The empirical analysis examines this argument with data on more than 6000 legislative decision-making processes that were concluded between 1980 and the end of 2007. The analysis demonstrates a strong and robust association between the type of legislative procedure and different decision-making levels in the Council: a more powerful EP leads to more politicized Council decision-making. In terms of the legitimacy of EU decision-making, this finding implies that empowering the EP does not only create a direct link between EU lawmaker and ordinary citizens, but also contributes to strengthening the indirect link between Council members and their national electorates

The Impact of Council’s Internal Decision-Making Rules on the Future EU

This paper deals with the voting rules in the EU Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are evaluated. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the member states and external impact affects power relations between the main decision-making bodies in the EU. One of the main lessons of the analysis is clearly to explain why the design of Council voting rules has required so much bargaining and cumbersome marathon negotiations.European integration, Council of Ministers, power

Bargaining and Distribution of Power in the EU's Conciliation Committee

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful ‘codecision makers’, understanding of the final stage of the procedure – bargaining in the Conciliation Committee – is crucial. Here, EP and CM are assumed to have spatial preferences determined by their respective internal decision mechanisms. Applying bargaining theory to predict inter-institutional agreements in the Conciliation Committee, it turns out that although institutionally the Council and the Parliament are seemingly in a symmetric position, CM has significantly greater influence on EU legislation.European Union codecision procedure, Conciliation Committee, bargaining, spatial voting, decision procedures

Legislate or Delegate? Bargaining over Implementation and Legislative Authority in the European Union

In this article we explain how actors' ability to bargain successfully in order to advance their institutional preferences has changed over time as a function of the particular institutional context. We show how actors use their bargaining power under given institutional rules in order to shift the existing balance between legislation and delegation, and shift the rules governing delegation in their favor, between formal treaty changes. We argue that a collective actor's preferences over delegation is a function of whether the actor has more ability to influence policy through delegation or through legislation. We go on to argue that the degree to which a specific actor's preferences can prevail (in a setting in which different actors have different preferences) will depend upon its bargaining power under existing institutional rules, i.e. its ability to impede or veto policy in order to change the division between legislation and delegation and the rules of delegation. Our primary focus in this article is on choice over procedure; i.e. the battles over whether or not delegation or legislation should be employed. We maintain a secondary focus on change in procedure, examining how different procedures of comitology have come into being and been removed from the table. We examine the evolution of the debate over comitology and implementation, over five key periods. We scrutinize how actors within these periods seek to shift the balance of legislation and delegation and the rules of delegation according to their preferences. Our conclusions assess our empirical findings on the basis of our model.accountability; European Commission; Council of Ministers; European Parliament; European Parliament

Institutional theory and legislatures

Institutionalism has become one of the dominant strands of theory within contemporary political science. Beginning with the challenge to behavioral and rational choice theory issued by March and Olsen, institutional analysis has developed into an important alternative to more individualistic approaches to theory and analysis. This body of theory has developed in a number of ways, and perhaps the most commonly applied version in political science is historical institutionalism that stresses the importance of path dependency in shaping institutional behaviour. The fundamental question addressed in this book is whether institutionalism is useful for the various sub-disciplines within political science to which it has been applied, and to what extent the assumptions inherent to institutional analysis can be useful for understanding the range of behavior of individuals and structures in the public sector. The volume will also examine the relative utility of different forms of institutionalism within the various sub-disciplines. The book consists of a set of strong essays by noted international scholars from a range of sub-disciplines within the field of political science, each analyzing their area of research from an institutionalist perspective and assessing what contributions this form of theorizing has made, and can make, to that research. The result is a balanced and nuanced account of the role of institutions in contemporary political science, and a set of suggestions for the further development of institutional theory

The European Commission – Appointment, Preferences, and Institutional Relations

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate the policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules still prevent the Commission from being a Council clone in aggregate. Rather, it is predicted a priori that Commission policies are on average more in accord with the aggregate position of the Parliament than that of the Council. This prediction is confirmed for a data set covering 66 dossiers with 162 controversial EU legislative proposals passed between 1999 and 2002.European Commission, investiture procedure, voting rules, Council of Ministers, European Parliament

Early days : the European parliament, codecision and the European union legislative process post-Maastricht

Since the European Parliament's first vote on a Council common position submitted under the co-decision procedure in January 1994 the practice of co-decision has been scrutinized carefully within Parliament and the other European Union (EU) institutions. However, such scrutiny has produced differing interpretations. This article seeks to assess these respective claims by analysing the first thirty-two legislative proposals processed under co-decision, and so to make an initial assessment of the legislative impact of the European Parliament under the new procedure. Under co-decision Parliament is a more equal partner in the EU's legislative process, and now has a rightful place alongside Council in several important policy areas - despite the weighting of the procedure towards Council. Certainly, informal inter-institutional linkages have expanded as a result of co-decision and, whatever their qualitative effect, there has been an undeniable quantitative increase in the interactions between Parliament and Council. The net result of the dialogue between Parliament and Council is the confirmation of an increasingly bipartite bargaining process and this, in turn, has placed the Commission in a considerably more ambiguous, and weaker, position than in the co-operation or consultation procedures

The Effect of Inter-institutional Rules on the Division of Power in the European Parliament: Allocation of Consultation versus Codecision Reports

Studies on the internal organization of the European Parliament (EP) have largely overlooked the impact of its inter-institutional context. Addressing the gap, this paper examines how the different inter-institutional balance of power under the consultation and codecision legislative procedures affects the intra-parliamentary allocation of consultation and codecision reports. The analysis of reports allocated during 2004-2007 shows that the higher competition for codecision reports left unchecked by the informal rules of report allocation has produced clear winners and losers. Disloyal party group members are ‘punished’ by group coordinators in the allocation of any reports. Furthermore, members of the centre-right party group coalition are privileged in the allocation of codecision reports, while legislators with outlying special interests and experts are given systematic access only to drafting consultation reports. Thus, the main mechanisms driving report allocation appear to be promoting party group cohesion and majority formation