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The imperfect agenda-setter: Why do legislative proposals fail in the EU decision-making process?

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Abstract

This article analyzes how uncertainty about the location of the pivotal actor influences the outcome of Commission proposals. We argue that the Commission is an imperfect agenda-setter and expect that Commission proposals are more likely to fail when uncertainty increases in the bicameral legislature of the Council and the European Parliament. Considering all legislative acts decided under the co-decision procedure proposed in the period from November 1993 until December 2009, we focus on withdrawal of Commission proposals as failures. In the empirical analysis we distinguish between electoral and procedural uncertainty and provide evidence that both types of uncertainty explain withdrawal of Commission proposals.

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... They do so to reduce the uncertainty associated with subsequent legislative negotiations. Yet, the amount of uncertainty governments face during the preparation of their policy proposals is a direct consequence of the inclusiveness of the employed decision-making procedure (Boranbay-Akan et al., 2017). When no other actor can veto or amend a government's proposal, the government faces no uncertainty and can simply propose its ideal point. ...
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The complexity of public policies has repeatedly been identified as a key challenge for modern democracies. Yet, we know only very little about the origins of this complexity. Controlling for functional and legal explanations, this article investigates whether complex policies have distinct institutional and political origins. The study builds on the assumption that complex policies are communicated in more complex language and uses textual data from 1,771 legislative proposals issued by the European Commission since 1994 to demonstrate that the complexity of public policies is strongly tied to institutional and political costs of policy formulation. Collegial cabinets formulate more complex policies whenever they face more inclusive decision‐making processes and struggle with higher internal preference bias and heterogeneity. The implications of these findings reach far beyond the political system of the EU and highlight that to a considerable degree, complex policies are the price of inclusive democratic decision‐making. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
... Despite its powers of initiation granted by the treaties, the Commission lacks formal decision-making powers in the EU's legislative process. While it may withdraw proposals if they look likely to fail or stray too far from its objectives (Boranbay-Akan et al., 2017;Lupo, 2018;Reh et al., 2020), this power to introduce, amend, or withdraw legislative proposals does not always translate into effective agenda-setting authority (Rasmussen, 2007;Gardner, 2013). On the contrary, due to different opportunity structures and internal constraints (for example, debates, conflicts, and partisan or institutional divides within the Commission), the Commission's ability and willingness to frame policy issues and employ its formal powers vary considerably (Kassim et al., 2013;Hartlapp et al., 2014) across policy issues (Burns, 2004), decision-making procedures (Thomson and Hosli, 2006), and even responsible Directorates-General (Rauh, 2021). ...
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... The probability that these proposals become binding European law has been constantly higher than 85 percent (cf. Boranbay-Akan et al. 2017;Rauh 2018). In sum, its informal and formal agenda-setting powers as well as the high extent to which it uses them suggest that the Commission has quite some clout over the rules that govern Europe's more than 500 million citizens. ...
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The public politicisation of European integration indicates a growing demand for public justification of supranational authority. This paper highlights that the messages the European Commission sends to its citizens do not meet this demand. A text analysis of almost 45,000 press releases the Commission has issued during 35 years of European integration rather indicates an extremely technocratic style of communication. Benchmarked against national executive communication, public political media, and scientific discourse, the Commission used and continues to use very complex language, specialized jargon, and a nominal style that obfuscates political action. This appears risky if not dangerous in a politicized context and more research on the reasons for this apparent communication deficit is needed.
... The Commission functions as a formal or informal agenda-setter in EU policymaking, including the reform of the Eurozone. Where the Commission holds exclusive formal agenda-setting privileges, it can shape decision outcomes by way of the proposals it tables ( Pollack 2003;Kreppel and Oztas 2017;Boranbay-Akan et al. 2017). Where the Commission holds no such special privileges but participates in policy-making next to member governments, it may influence outcomes through informal agenda setting and mediation, drawing on its institutional position and reservoir of policy and process information ( Schmidt 2000;Costello and Thomson 2013). ...
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This article analyses the circumstances under which the European Commission implements its legislative programme on time. Similar to many national governments the European Commission announces an annual Work Programme, where it identifies important legislation it plans to propose within 12 or 18 months. This study is based on an original dataset of 233 legislative proposals listed in the Work Programme in the period 2005-2012. I show that the Commission implements at least 94% of its legislative programme, where 76% of the proposed legislation is formally introduced within the deadline. The empirical analysis provides evidence that procedural and technical complexity decreases the probability of timely implementation. In addition, proposals listed in Work Programmes that allow for the introduction of some proposals within the extended deadline of 18 months are more likely to be introduced on time. The size of the gridlock interval, as defined in spatial models, does not have a statistically significant effect.
Article
Informal trilogues have become a standard operating procedure in the European Union’s ordinary legislative procedure. Generally, their occurrence is seen as a trade-off in which speed is prioritized over inclusive decision making. Hence, a relationship is assumed between intra-institutional processes and inter-institutional interactions. This article therefore tries to explain the number of informal trilogues in first readings. The contribution of this analysis is twofold. First, it shows that intra-institutional political processes such as contestation of the rapporteur’s preferences, politicization inside the Council and the number of shadow rapporteurs matter. Second, it for the first time measures the number of informal trilogues directly for the full population of post-Lisbon legislative files.
Article
This paper presents a spatial model of the EU's co-decision procedure, introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht. The theory characterizes the set of policies that can be adopted and the equilibrium EU policy as a function of the ideal policies of the member countries, the Commission, and the Parliament, and the location of the status quo. The paper examines whether the Parliament has become a legislator of equal stature to the Council, and discusses the Commission's power and the extent of indecision under the co-decision procedure. A comparison with the EU's other principal legislative procedures yields comparative statements about EU policy and the institutions' powers.
Article
By modeling sophisticated forms of committee behavior--sophistication with full information and expected utility maximization with incomplete information--this article more fully conveys the nature and importance of committee power than does previous work based on sincere committee behavior. Under the germaneness rule, for example, sophisticated committee behavior greatly expands the set of structure-induced equilibrium points. Under the closed rule, as another example, sophisticated committee behavior, based on compromise and a careful crafting of bills, moves legislative outcomes closer to the committee's preferred outcomes. Incomplete information and risk aversion lead committee members to behave more cautiously, thereby introducing more inertia into the legislative process and expanding equilibrium sets.
Article
Tsebelis (1994) argues in the American Political Science Review that the European Parliament has important power due to its right as a conditional agenda setter. I claim that Tsebelis' argument is based either on an incomplete analysis or on inaccurately specified decision rules. An accurate modeling of the cooperation procedure as stated in Article 189c of the Treaty of the European Community and as applied in practice changes the results considerably. Based on such a model, I provide an explanation of why the European Parliament sometimes can make successful amendments.
Article
Equilibria are identified for a three-person game theoretic model of a legislature in which two heterogeneous committee members have superior information (vis-à-vis the legislature) about the consequences of policies that fall in their committee's jurisdiction. Equilibria associated with open, modified, and closed rules are each assessed in terms of distributional benefits (which legislators win and at whose expense) and informational efficiency (how much information becomes available in the course of decision making). While the closed rule tends to confer distributional benefits to the proposing committee member at the direct expense of other legislators, the informational efficiency of the closed rule is greater than that for open and modified rules. The findings have implications for the choice of rules governing the consideration of committee's proposals and for the composition of specialized standing committees.
Article
For decades the European Commission’s possible legislative influence has interested scholars of EU studies, yet few empirical studies on the determinants of the Commission’s influence exist. This paper analyses quantitative data on 60 EU proposals to show to which degree rather endogenous resources of the Commission, external conditions determined by the EU member states or institutional constraints determine the Commission’s influence on EU legislation. Modeling the Commission as an agent having resources and strategic options, I demonstrate that the Commission’s ability to defend the content of its original proposals is to a large extent dependent on its principals, the member states. Endogenous resources of the Commission such as expertise and experience influence only to a small extent the legislative success of the Commission. Thus, this study allows gaining a deeper understanding on the factors influencing the European Commission’s influence on legislative affairs.
Book
Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto Players advances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo. Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics, Veto Players will be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.
Article
We examine the extent to which governments consider the role of bicameral conflict resolution procedures in legislative agenda-setting. We argue that governments may use these institutions to promote policy change in the event of bicameral conflict, especially when facing uncertainty over bicameral policy preferences. We test our arguments using comprehensive original data on forty years of German legislation and find that bicameral conflict resolution committees play a more sophisticated role in governmental policy making than previously suspected.
Article
The conciliation committee is the ultimate bicameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? We argue that its institutional setup is biased in favour of the Council of Ministers. Employing the Wordfish algorithm, we show that the joint text is more similar to the Council common position than to the parliamentary reading in almost 70 percent of the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. The European Parliament is more successful in the post-Amsterdam period, when the Council decides by qualified majority voting, the rapporteur comes from a large party, the European Commission is supportive, and when national administrations are more involved in the implementation process than the Commission.
Article
How does legislative gridlock affect the type of legislative output? Do bureaucratic actors expand their activities when the legislature is unlikely to overrule them? This article investigates the impact of legislative gridlock on bureaucratic activities, combining data on all secondary and tertiary legislative acts of the European Union in the period from 1983 to 2009. Compared to secondary legislation, which is decided by the Council and the European Parliament, tertiary legislation is enacted by the European Commission alone. Our findings reveal that bureaucratic activities of the European Commission expand in times of increased legislative gridlock in the Council. The expansionist activities of the bureaucracy are corroborated by our findings about informational complexity and legal foundation: the more complex an act is and the less precise its legal basis, the more likely is tertiary legislation by the bureaucracy. Once the European Commission has received power to enact tertiary legislation, we conclude, there is a significant risk that the type of legislative output changes towards more bureaucratic legislation. This expansion of tertiary legislation, in turn, raises questions on the levels of democratic legitimacy and the representation of interests in the European Union.
Article
This article analyzes whether institutional reform has enabled the European Union (EU) to deal efficiently with an expanding legislative agenda, We use the time lag between a Commission proposal and a Council decision as the central indicator of EU decision-making efficiency and develop four hypotheses about factors influencing the proposal-decision time lag. We test these hypotheses by analyzing all proposals for binding EU legislation made between 1984 and 1994 using event history analysis. Our results show that institutional reform had a substantial impact on decision- making efficiency and suggest that the EU is capable of an effective institutional response to an expending legislative agenda. However, decision-making efficiency is not the only goal guiding EU institutional reform.
Article
The European Parliament under the current cooperation procedure has an important power: it can make proposals that, if accepted by the Commission of the European Communities, are easier for the Council of Ministers to accept than to modify, since only qualified majority is required for acceptance, whereas full unanimity for modification. The importance of this power, which I call the power of the conditional agenda setter, has not been recognized in previous scholarly work. For structural reasons explained in the text, this power is likely to increase in the future. I conclude by arguing that the conditional delegation of power to international actors (the European Parliament, Commission, and the Court of Justice) is a frequent phenomenon in European institutions. This delegation presents three important advantages: it makes possible the selection of one among many possible equilibria, it accelerates European integration, and it diffuses responsibility for politically unpopular measures.
Article
Moser analyzes the cooperation procedure using a model that assumes (1) one dimension and (2) complete information. I show that because of these two restrictive assumptions and his misunderstanding of the strategic implications of Article 189a(1) of the Maastricht Treaty (an article also present in the Single European Act and the Treaty of Rome), Moser's conclusions are mistaken. In particular, his predicted outcomes are incorrect, and his major institutional prediction (that the European Parliament plays no role in decision making except in the second round of the cooperation procedure) is contradicted by thousands of parliamentary amendments, the major part of which accepted in the first round.
Article
What is the scope for autonomous action of the European Commission? Its independence is much more contentious than that of the European Court of Justice, which is generally considered quite autonomous. While the literature on the Commission focuses predominantly on its ability to use its agenda-setting powers, the Commission's other means to influence European integration have been less well established. In this paper, I demonstrate how the Commission can use its role as a guardian of the Treaty to coax the Council of Ministers into action. In addition to agenda setting, the Commission can manipulate the Council's default condition, or change the preferences of some of its member states. Thereby the Commission may achieve decisions from the Council that would not have come about had the Commission only agenda-setting powers at its disposal. Effectively, the Commission here uses the greater autonomy of the European Court strategically for its own ends.
Article
This paper compares legislative dynamics under all procedures in which the Council of Ministers votes by qualified majority (QMV). We make five major points. First, the EU governments have sought to reduce the democratic deficit by increasing the powers of the European Parliament since 1987, whereas they have lessened the legislative influence of the Commission. Under the Amsterdam treaty's version of the codecision procedure, the Parliament is a coequal legislator with the Council, whereas the Commission's influence is likely to be more informal than formal. Second, as long as the Parliament acts as a pro-integration entrepreneur, policy outcomes under consultation, cooperation and the new codecision will be more integrationist than the QMV-pivot in the Council prefers. Third, the pace of European integration may slow down if MEPs become more responsive to the demands of their constituents. Fourth, the EU is evolving into a bicameral legislature with a heavy status quo bias. Not only does the Council use QMV but absolute majority voting requirements and high levels of absenteeism create a de facto supermajority threshold for Parliamentary decisions. Finally, if the differences between the Council and the Parliament concern regulation issues on a traditional left-right axis, the Commission is more likely to be the ally of the Council than the Parliament.
Article
This article presents spatial models of three legislative procedures in the EC: the consultation, co-operation and assent procedures. The theory characterizes for each procedure the set of policies that can be adopted and the equilibrium EC policy as a function of the ideal policies of the countries, the Commission and the Parliament, and the location of the status quo. It yields comparative statements about EC policy and the institutions' powers under the three procedures, thus providing a framework for assessing arguments about the merits and demerits of existing EC institutions and proposals for institutional change.
Article
Practitioners as well as scholars of European integration have for decades debated why it takes so long for the European Union (EU) to adopt legislation and how to improve decision-making efficiency. Four studies have investigated decision-making speed using survival analysis, a particularly appropriate quantitative technique. In this paper I show that all four studies suffer from serious methodological problems that render their conclusions unreliable. I then outline where work in this area should focus, and take an initial step in this direction by fitting a methodologically more appropriate survival model to my 2002 EU decision-making data set (Golub, 2002). Substantively, the results indicate that throughout the EU's history, for the most important types of legislation, qualified majority voting (QMV) and EU enlarge-ment have increased decision-making speed, whereas empowerment of the European Parliament and extreme preference heterogeneity amongst decision-makers have decreased it. Theoretically, formal approaches – spatial models and especially coalition theory – do a better job of explaining these results than do perspectives that privilege informal norms.
Article
This article analyses the role of the Commission in the European Union (EU). We present a game-theoretical model of two EU processes - Commission appointment and the adoption of legislation - and apply this model to the appointment of recent Commissions and their legislative programmes. Institutional reforms of the EU have led to more involvement of the European Parliament and majority voting in the Council in both processes. We find that the introduction of majority voting in the legislative process in the mid-1980s let the Commission move policy further from the status quo. Yet unanimity for appointing the Commission still allowed the member states to commit to a legislative programme that was preferred by all of them. More recently, the move to majority voting for appointing the Commission, combined with the ability of the European Parliament to amend Commission proposals, has moved the EU towards a more majoritarian political system. However, the potential policy consequences of these changes have been limited thus far because of the particular configuration of policy preferences of the governments and the European Parliament.
Article
Collective choice bodies throughout the world use a diverse array of codified rules that determine who may exercise procedural rights, and in what order. This paper analyzes several two-stage decision-making models, focusing on one in which the first-moving actor has a unique, unilateral, procedural right to enforce the status quo, i.e., to exercise gatekeeping. Normative analysis using Pareto-dominance criteria reveals that the institution of gatekeeping is inferior to another institutional arrangement within this framework—namely, one in which the same actor is given a traditional veto instead of a gatekeeping right. The analytical results raise an empirical puzzle: when and why would self-organizing collective choice bodies adopt gatekeeping institutions? A qualitative survey of governmental institutions suggests that—contrary to an entrenched modeling norm within political science—empirical instances of codified gatekeeping rights are rare or nonexistent.
Article
Most intergovernmentalist analyses of European integration focus on treaty bargaining among European Union member governments. Recent articles also have examined everyday decision making through power index analysis, an approach that asserts that a government's ability to influence policy is a function of all possible coalitions in the Council of Ministers to which it is pivotal. This approach suffers from two major weaknesses. First, it fails to take into account the policy preferences of governments; it overestimates the influence of governments holding extreme preferences and underestimates that of more centrist governments. Second, power index analysis fails to consider the important roles of the Commission of the European Communities and the European Parliament in legislative processes. Today's procedures affect the mix of agenda-setting and veto power, and this has systematic effects on policy outcomes. If intergovernmentalism is to explain choices made during treaty rounds, it must take into account these legislative dynamics.
Article
This paper studies the Treaty of Amsterdam's reform of the co-decision procedure in the European Union. The paper presents spatial models of the procedure, and examines whether the Treaty significantly alters it. The theory analyzes the implications of the Treaty for the equilibrium EU policies and the institutions' powers. It characterizes sets of policies the Commission can successfully propose under the old procedure, and sets of policies the Council and the Parliament can successfully propose as joint texts under the new procedure. The paper concludes that the new procedure does not lead to a further increase in the Parliament's powers, as intended by the drafters of the Treaty. Rather it finds that the Treaty eliminates the Commission's power under co-decision and may increase indecision.
Article
Systematically revised and rewritten throughout and updated to cover the impact of the Lisbon Treaty, this highly-successful and ground-breaking text remains unique in analyzing the EU as a political system using the methods of comparative political science.
Article
The late-twentieth century has given rise to the most concentrated period of divided party government in American history. With one party controlling the presidency and the opposing party controlling Congress, the veto has inevitably become a critical tool of presidential power. Combining sophisticated game theory with unprecedented data, this book analyzes how divided party presidents use threats and vetoes to wrest policy concessions from a hostile Congress. Case studies of the most important vetoes in recent history add texture to the analysis, detailing how President Clinton altered the course of Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution. Offering the first book-length analysis to bring rational choice theory to bear on the presidency, Veto Bargaining offers a major contribution to our understanding of American politics in an age of divided party government.
Book
European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of detailed evidence and theoretical rigour, this 2006 volume addresses these questions and others that are central to understanding how the EU works in practice. It focuses on the practice of day-to-day decision-making in Brussels and the interactions that take place among the Member States in the Council and among the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. A unique data set of actual Commission proposals are examined against which the authors develop, apply and test a range of explanatory models of decision-making, exemplifying how to study decision-making in other political systems using advanced theoretical tools and appropriate research design.
Article
We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numerical experiments, we successfully implement a globally convergent variant of Broyden's method on a preconditioned version of the collocation equations, and the method economizes on computation cost by more than 50% compared to the value iteration method. We rely on a continuity property of the equilibrium set to obtain increasingly precise approximations of solutions to the continuum model. We showcase these techniques with an illustration of the dynamic core convergence theorem of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008) in a nine-player, two-dimensional model with negative quadratic preferences.