Self-Regulation by Associations: Collective Action Problems in European Environmental Regulation

How and to what effect do firms coordinate their actions in order to deal with the negative external effects of productive activity? Under which conditions do firm associations engage in environmental self-regulation and what kind of governance devices do they develop in order to tackle the specific regulatory challenges at stake? Is the 'shadow of hierarchy', the credible threat of legislation, executive intervention or court rulings, a necessary condition for associative action to emerge? Or is it only necessary if a redistributive problem is at stake? These are the questions discussed in this article. We will first develop the theoretical argument based on economic institutionalism, derive hypotheses and then submit the propositions to a first empirical assessment of associative self-regulation on waste recycling in the plastic and paper industry.governance; self-regulation; shadow of hierarchy; transaction cost theory.

Codecision and its discontents: Intra-organisational politics and institutional reform in the European Parliament

This paper investigates a recent trend in EU legislative politics: the de facto shift of decision making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas, and the subsequent adoption of legislation at first reading. Previous research has explained why fast-track legislation occurs and evaluated its democratic consequences. This study focuses on how the EP has responded to the steep increase in informal and fast-tracked legislation. First, we show how fast-track legislation has informalised legislative decision-making, transformed inter-organisational relations, and created new asymmetrical opportunities and constraints. Second, we theorise the political discontents in response to this transformation. Drawing on rational choice institutionalism and bargaining theory, we argue, first, that actors will seek to redress asymmetrical opportunities through institutional reform; that attempts of redress will centre on the control of negotiation authority and information flows; and that institutional reform will be highly contested. Second, we suggest that the chances of successful redress will be low in the EP as a decentralised organisation unless two conditions are met: 1) the extent of fast-track legislation reaches a critical level, and 2) the organisation goes through a period of wider reform; the former will facilitate reform through the increased visibility of disempowerment and reputational costs; the latter through package deals in a multi-issue negotiation space, and/or the strategic evocation of collective parliamentary norms. Third, we probe our argument by analysing how the EP’s rules pertaining to codecision have been contested, negotiated and reformed from the introduction of fast-track legislation in 1999 to the adoption of the Code of Conduct for Negotiating Codecision Files in 2009. Based on qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews, our paper offers a first systematic analysis of how fast-track legislation has impacted on intraorganisational politics and reform in the EP

Contested delegation: the Impact of co-decision on comitology

WOS:000285150800007 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science)“Prémio Científico ISCTE-IUL 2012”This article shows that, for the area of environmental policy, the Commission and the Council have been more willing to rely on extensive delegation after the introduction of co-decision. It also shows that the tendency of these two actors to delegate has followed the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty – which indicates that the Council and Commission had anticipated their relative loss of power to the EP and rushed to delegate as much as possible before the effective introduction of co-decision. However, the Council was only willing to delegate more to the Commission on condition that it could exert as much control as possible over the procedure by using regulatory committees. These empirical findings confirm a distributive institutionalist argument according to which the Council and the Commission, seeking to maximise their institutional power, would try to circumvent the EP through delegation when the latter's competences in legislation increase. The expectation, also based on this argument, that the EP would react to this behaviour by opposing delegation altogether was not confirmed: the EP, rather than opposing delegation as such, has systematically tried to restrict its scope

Financial markets regulation : political accountability challenged

This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically illustrate the challenges that financial market regulation presents to politicians and the organization tasked with specifying regulations and supervising their implementation in the interest of users and consumers of financial instruments. It analyses the problem from the viewpoint of the governor's dilemma and the control/competence conflict, the linked problem of the rent-seeking of agents/intermediators and consumers of financial instruments. Political accountability problems are enhanced by the materiality of the technologies used, i.e. algo trading

The European Parliament as a driving force of constitutionalisation

Study for the AFCO CommiteeThis report analyses the increasing role played by the European Parliament (EP) in the EU decision-making process. In the first part (Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5), it describes how the EP acquired more power in legislation, comitology, in the appointment of the European Commission and in the budgetary field. In the second part (Sections 6 and 7), the report illustrates the EP’s role in two relevant policy fields: economic governance and external trade agreements. The report demonstrates that EP’s formal and informal powers in legislation, comitology, Commission investiture, the budgetary process, economic governance and international agreements have increased strikingly since the Treaty of Rome. This empowerment is partially explained by the concern for democratic legitimacy on the part of some member states’ (and the Commission). To another important part the empowerment may be explained by the fact that treaties frequently contain ambiguous provisions and thus allow room for informal rules to emerge through bargaining specifying the details of treaty provisions

Divergence via Europeanisation: rethinking the origins of the Portuguese debt crisis

A founding myth of the euro was that profound economic convergence could be achieved across the core and periphery of Europe. Scholarship from within Comparative Political Economy (CPE) has compellingly pointed to this myth of convergence as the fundamental mistake of the euro project (Regan, “Imbalance of Capitalisms”). Economic and Monetary Union was applied across a range of incompatible varieties of capitalism with little appreciation for how difficult it would be for peripheral economies to overcome long-standing institutional stickiness. Yet, while institutional stickiness tells us much about the causes of declining competitiveness, it tells us much less about the origins of brand new patterns of debt-led growth. This article modifies this CPE account by drawing attention to the much overlooked case of Portugal. In contrast to CPE’s emphasis on institutional stickiness, this paper explores the ways in which negotiation of European integration has been generative of institutional transformation leading to debt-led growth in Portugal. By combining Europeanisation with CPE, this article shows that, far from an inability to do so, in the case of Portugal, it has been the attempt to ‘follow the rules’ of European Integration that explains its damaging patterns of debt-led growth

Instances and connectors : issues for a second generation process language

This work is supported by UK EPSRC grants GR/L34433 and GR/L32699Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined, used and evaluated. It is now possible to consider second generation languages based on this experience. Rather than develop a second generation wish list this position paper explores two issues: instances and connectors. Instances relate to the relationship between a process model as a description and the, possibly multiple, enacting instances which are created from it. Connectors refers to the issue of concurrency control and achieving a higher level of abstraction in how parts of a model interact. We believe that these issues are key to developing systems which can effectively support business processes, and that they have not received sufficient attention within the process modelling community. Through exploring these issues we also illustrate our approach to designing a second generation process language.Postprin