Adrienne Héritier

European University Institute | EUI

Purpose 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 go...

Drawing on an original and unprecedented survey data set of 243 medium-and big-sized firms operating in five sectors(energy, telecommunications, railways, airlines, and postal services) and across 29 European countries, we analyse what incentivizes firms to interact with and influence multiple regulators. In so doing, we map the regulatory opportun...

This book analyses the European Parliament’s strategies of self-empowerment over time stretching across cases of new institutional prerogatives as well as substantive policy areas. It considers why and how the Parliament has managed to gain formal and informal powers in this wide variety of cases. The book provides a systematic and comparative anal...

This chapter develops the book’s theoretical argument and expectations for which we draw on rational choice institutionalism as well as sociological institutionalism. First, in Chapter 2.1, we identify reasons for the EP’s empowerment based on rationalist bargaining theories of institutional change. We assume that actors such as the EP seek to maxi...

In this chapter, we investigate the EP’s institutional role in economic governance during the Eurozone crisis and its aftermath. The Lisbon Treaty restricts the EP’s right to co-legislation in economic governance primarily to the area of multilateral surveillance. The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, however, coincided with the onset of the E...

In this chapter, we examine why and how the EP managed to expand its powers in the nomination and investiture of the European Commission from zero at the outset of European integration to a quasi-election of the Commission President using the Spitzenkandidaten procedure in 2014. This chapter provides evidence that the EP has been using a multitude...

In this chapter, we summarise and review the most important findings of the empirical case studies. We crystallise how in all of these cases the EP had considerable success in expanding its formal and informal powers by using its strategies skilfully. Furthermore, we systematically compare which strategies the EP used to widen its powers; how this...

This chapter examines the EP’s informal empowerment in the highly politicized area of EU trade agreements. In trade policy, the Lisbon Treaty granted the EP a major new right of ratification of international agreements falling under the common commercial policy. We analyse how the EP managed to significantly widen its powers beyond the final approv...

This chapter serves to explain how we assess our theoretical expectations empirically by relying on the congruence method in combination with process-tracing. Further, it specifies our methods of data collection. Moreover, we explain the book’s case selection rationale covering the EP’s institutional empowerment (or lack of it) over time and across...

This chapter analyses the EP’s success and failure in empowering itself in the budgetary process. The EP’s prerogatives in the budgetary process have increased significantly since the creation of the European Economic Community. However, this empowerment has been mostly informal and irregular: treaty provisions kept intact for more than thirty year...

This chapter examines the driving forces of the EP’s formal and informal institutional power gains in the EU’s legislative process. Over a period of around fifty years, the institutional rule went from giving the EP a merely consultative role in the legislative procedure to establishing it as a coequal legislator with the Council of Ministers under...

With the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament (EP) obtained co-decision rights in economic governance for the first time. Soon afterwards, the outbreak of the eurozone crisis required a reform of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). When negotiating EMU reform, the EP sought to push its rights beyond the Lisbon provisions, so as to obtain an in...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the plausibility of four different mid-term paths of development of the European Union (EU): first, a political union or a European state; second, a differentiated and flexible integration of the polity; third, a covert and deepening integration of the polity outside of the political arenas; fourth, t...

The chapter focuses on how multilevel governance affects interstitial institutional change in decision-making in the EU. Interstitial institutional change occurs if formal institutional rules are ambiguous, and in consequence, when applied, are renegotiated by actors. Each concerned actor seeks to strengthen its own institutional power in these ren...

Drawing on an original and unprecedented survey data set of 243 medium-and big-sized firms operating in five sectors(energy, telecommunications, railways, airlines, and postal services) and across 29 European countries, we analyse what incentivizes firms to interact with and influence multiple regulators. In so doing, we map the regulatory opportun...

This article concludes the special issue by outlining the author’s perspective on 40 years of research on interests, institutions, and policy-making in sub-national, national, and supranational settings. The first part of the article five general comments is developed on 1. the relationship between politics and policies, 2. vertical widening in ter...

Is there a trade-off between methodological rigour and substantive relevance in political science? If yes, is this related to the use of quantitative or qualitative methods? Focusing on four arguments raised by Mead (2010), the article discusses the pros and cons of the critique of 'excessive specialization', 'methodologism', 'nonempiricism' and 'l...

This 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 re...

While the exercise of leadership by states is critical in the study of regional and global governance, scholars must pay close attention to the role of nonstate actors and networks as well.

How does one explain the variation in the EU's success in enacting and enforcing policies that lead to the supply of regional or global public goods? We examine how the EU deploys its positional resources to enact laws that compel governments or firms to contribute to the provision of public goods. We suggest that leaders such as the EU are able to...

One of the most important developments in the history of the EU’s codecision procedure has been the steep rise in “early agreements” since 1999, and the shift of legislative decision-making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas. As part of a wider research project on “The Informal Politics of Codecision”, this working paper launches a n...

Mixed-methods designs have received burgeoning attention in the academic community during the last decade not only in the social sciences but also in public health research and psychological science (Giddings, 2006; Doyle et al., 2009). Multimethod approaches and techniques of triangulation have a long tradition in these literatures (Campbell and F...

This article investigates a widespread yet understudied trend in EU politics: the shift of legislative decision making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas and the subsequent adoption of legislation as early agreements. Since its introduction in 1999, fast-track legislation has increased dramatically, accounting for 72% of codecision f...

Twenty years of practising codecision offers a welcome opportunity to pause and consider the structures, processes and policy impacts arising from this procedure and allows for a fine-grained analysis of the operation of codecision and its effects upon the various institutional actors. More specifically, it allows us to examine whether the European...

This final chapter summarizes what has been learnt about policy dismantling in two different fields of policy-social and environmental. It reminds us of the challenges that had to be overcome in the pursuit of a more comparative approach, chiefly developing definitions, measures, and categorizations that 'travel' more easily between the two fields....

This chapter focuses on the manufacturing of markets in transatlantic aviation. For half a century between the mid-1940s and the mid-1990s, transatlantic trade in air transport services was one of the tightest-regulated markets in the industrial world. Much of this changed in April 2007: in one of the most economically and politically important ins...

The article examines how changes of powers in the inter-institutional balance have affected the willingness of the Commission and the Council to delegate legislative power to comitology committees. Starting from the assumption that actors seek to maximize their institutional power in order to increase their influence over policy outcomes, we argue...

This article investigates the consequences of fast-track legislation in the European Union. Previous research has explained why fast-track legislation occurs and evaluated its democratic repercussions. This study focuses on the European Parliament (EP)’s intra-organisational response. It first describes how the early adoption of EU legislation has...

This article explains how institutional rules change after they have been established in two important areas of European decision‐making: co‐decision and comitology. It shows how legislation under co‐decision was transformed into fast‐track legislation and why the Parliament gradually – between treaty reforms – gained more institutional power in co...

This chapter includes an empirical study examining the reasons why buyer firms will demonstrate a sense of corporate social responsibility in prescribing-and ensuring-socially responsible actions on the part of their supplier firms. Suppliers' products and production processes are increasingly controlled by buyer firms to ensure that suppliers obse...

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant—from straight-forward descriptive words like “sweet” and “fragrant”, colorful metaphors like “ostentatious” and “brash”, to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are emplo...

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 Commi...

Among the factors providing incentives to monitor the behaviour of input suppliers are the regulatory requirements to which downstream firms are subject. We develop a formal economic model to examine the relationship between the strictness of the regulatory environment and downstream firms’ incentives to act as inspectors of their sub-contractors....

The emergence and diffusion of new modes of governance in Europe has to be seen both in a wider context of more distant factors and a narrower context of more proximate factors. The wider context is defined by the continuing economic liberalization/deregulation and political enlargement of the European Union. The liberalization and deregulation of...

New modes of governance — as this book has shown — come in various guises, aim at various objectives, are based on numerous different instruments and are linked in varying ways to governmental action. Diverse as they are, they all strive to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of public policy-making, mostly by using soft instruments. By build...

This article raises the question of the link between new modes of governance and democratic accountability. Our definition of new modes of governance as modes refers to public policy-making that includes private actors and/or public policy-making by public actors that takes place outside legislative arenas, and which focuses on delimited sectoral o...

This article focuses on the institutions of transatlantic aviation since 1945, and aims at extracting from this historical process topical policy implications. Using the methodology of an analytic narrative, we describe and explain the creation of the international cartel institutions in the 1940s, their operation throughout the 1950s and 60s, thei...

With increasing fragmentation of worldwide production chains and the corresponding contracting relations between companies, the “firm as an inspector" has become a frequent phenomenon. Buyer firms deploy supervising activities over their suppliers' products and production processes in order to ensure their compliance with regulatory standards, th...

How and to what effect do firms coordinate their actions to deal with the negative external effects of productive activity? Under which conditions do associations engage in self-regulation and how do they tackle the specific regulatory challenges at stake? When developing hypotheses, we first vary attributes of the information environment in which...

Introduction This chapter presents a set of approaches to systematic explanation of specific empirical political and social phenomena. These approaches strive to create theoretical, generalizable knowledge with respect to the phenomena in question. In the search for terms of generalization, they differ from research that seeks an in-depth understan...

In technically complex areas, political actors increasingly rely on private actors to shape public policy. This is due to the greater expertise of the private actors, mostly industry. This article theorizes and empirically investigates the conditions under which self-regulation by industry (governance) emerges in environmental policy at the Europea...

This special issue about sectoral governance in the shadow of hierarchy focuses on two sets of questions. Firstly, do new modes of sectoral governance in themselves contribute to the efficacy of policymaking or do they require the shadow of hierarchy, i.e. legislative and executive decisions, in order to deal effectively with the problems they are...

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...

Based on the analysis of the different policy areas discussed in this volume, this article proposes a strategic choice argument to account for the differential outcomes in the establishing of mutual recognition and, if instituted, for the divergent outcomes of its implementation in the different policy areas. In this article it is argued that a rat...

The articles in this volume provide evidence supporting the claim that organisational actors within the EU do engage in contestation over competences over a wide variety of legislative and policy-making procedures. Far from defining EU politics, treaty texts are only their beginning. The articles also provide evidence that informal changes may be t...

In this article, we set out an approach to European Union politics that seeks to explain its development using theories of institutional change. In contrast to dominant theories which assume that the Treaties, the governing texts of the European Union, faithfully ensure that the desires of member states are respected, we argue that these theories a...

This article explains 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. Actors use their bargaining power under given institutional rules in order to shift the existing balance between legislation and delegation, and shift the...

This book poses the question: how and why do institutions change? Institutions, understood as rules of behaviour constraining and facilitating social interaction, are subject to different forms and processes of change. A change may be designed intentionally on a large scale and then be followed by a period of only incremental adjustments to new con...

We examine the sources and processes of institutional change in one important aspect of EU politics-the legislative procedure of codecision and show how interstitial change of institutions emerges between formal Treaty revisions and under specific conditions may be formalized in subsequent formal Treaty reforms. We develop two related models of Tre...

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 delegatio...

What is at the basis of regional integration and what are the processes that drive integration? Why do integration processes develop faster in some issue areas than in others? These questions are at the heart of our own work, just as they are the driving concerns of Ernst Haas's version of neofunctionalism. While we, unlike Haas, emphasize endogeno...

The authors argue that closer attention should be paid to the interorganizational rules of decision making and their implications for intraorganizational processes. They claim that exogenous changes in macro-institutional rules, which result in a move from formal and sequential to informal and simultaneous interaction between collective actors, wil...

Der Prozess der Internationalisierung und Europäisierung hat zur Herausbildung von Regulierungsformen geführt, die über Staatsgrenzen, Regierungsebenen und die Unterscheidung des Öffentlichen vom Privaten hinweggehen. Die Frage nach den Konsequenzen des Phänomens der Globalisierung für rechtliche wie für politische Regelungsstrukturen und -ebenen w...

The European Union (EU) is a "composite' democracy which features diverse forms of democratic legitimation: vertical legitimation through parliamentary representation in the European Parliament; executive representation through delegates of democratically elected governments in the Council of Ministers; horizontal mutual control among member states...

Current approaches examining the effect of institutions on policy processes have difficulty in explaining the results of the legislative process of codecision between European Parliament and Council within the European Union. The formal Treaty changes which gave rise to codecision have in turn given rise to a plethora of informal institutions, in a...

Explores the efficiency and effectiveness of new modes of European governance that are not based on legislation and include private actors in policy formulation. Focusses on the emergence, functioning, and impact of these new modes of governance, which include the open method of co-ordination, voluntary accords, and regulatory fora. Héritier answer...

Regulation of network industries is very different in Germany and the UK, not least because privatisation started earlier in the UK and has gone much further. This paper uses research among regulatory officials and senior executives in both incumbent and new entrant firms to compare and contrast the changing strategic relationships between regulato...

The provision of utilities for all at an affordable price has long been regarded as a prerequisite for everyday life, generally guaranteed by the state. But in recent years, publicly owned utilities throughout Europe have come under increasing fire for their poor performance—their lack of productive efficiency, their failure to identify consumer de...

The paper analyses how politics and adjudication answer similar questions in the context of policy-making. It contrasts how societal problems are selected, defined, solved and legitimised by both disciplines. We raise these questions in regard to the liberalization of the European Electricity markets. We reconstruct the decision-making process at t...

The paper analyses how politics and adjudication answer similar questions in the context of policy making. It contrasts how societal problems are selected, defined, solved and legitimised by both disciplines. We raise these questions with regard to the liberalization of the European electricity markets. We reconstruct the decision-making process at...

Current approaches to the understanding of institutional change in the European Union have difficulty in understanding how intergovernmental bargaining and day-to-day institutional change interact. This article develops a theoretical framework to understand this interaction, and applies it to the legislative process of codecision between European P...

Current research on the main bodies of the European Union (Council, Commission, Parliament) tends to concentrate either on relations within these bodies, or on relations between them. The result is that little attention is paid to how these two intersect; that is, to how changes in relations between bodies can affect relations among them, and vice...

The focus of this analysis is on new modes of governance and government in the European Union that (a) include private actors in policy formulation, and/or (b) while being based on public actors, (c) are only marginally based on legislation (these are hierarchical insofar as they are subject to a majority decision) or that are not based on legislat...

Although the goal of market integration has not actually been challenged in recent years, it has nevertheless increasingly come to be considered incomplete and in need of complementary goals which serve the general interest by promoting social cohesion and equality. The debate has been conducted in various areas, such as in the fight against unempl...

Community legislation is unquestionably a factor to be reckoned with in member-state policy making. But the extent and mode of its impact on domestic policies and administrative structures will depend on the existing policy practices and the political and institutional structures of the country in question. In cases where there is a mismatch betwee...

In the last decade the industrial landscape and regulatory structures of the network industries such as telecommunications, energy and rail transport, have undergone a profound transformation. Liberalization has fragmented the former natural monopoly sectors; new players with new preferences have emerged. New regulatory institutions have been creat...