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Concluding Early Agreements in the EU: A Double Principal‐Agent Analysis of Trilogue Negotiations
Abstract
Applying a principal-agent perspective on trilogue negotiations, this article examines how the rapporteur and the Presidency, as agents of respectively the European Parliament and the Council, are able to reach a deal with their fellow agent while avoiding an involuntary defection among their principals. Despite these intra- and inter-institutional constraints, early agreements can be concluded because agents execute two parallel tasks on behalf of their principals: representing them inter-institutionally and acting as the deal-facilitator intra-institutionally. We identify three ways in which the agents can combine these two acts of delegation and conclude an early agreement: (1) creating a tied-hand situation for themselves; (2) affecting the intra-institutional coalition formation by bringing in allies from the other institution; and (3) actively searching for signals from the principals and the fellow agent on the zone of possible agreement. We illustrate these dynamics through a case study of the policy-making process on the 2015 Decision on the Market Stability Reserve.
... Informal trilogues provide an alternative to the formal back and forth of readings between EP and Council. In trilogue meetings, as depicted in Figure 1, the institutions are represented by negotiating delegations tasked with facilitating and finding a legislative compromise within and between institutions (Delreux and Laloux, 2017). For the EP, this delegation includes, but is not limited to, the rapporteur, the shadow rapporteurs, the committee chair and an EP vice president (European Parliament, 2012), whereas the Council is represented by the rotating presidency at the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) or working party level (Häge and Naurin, 2013;Roederer-Rynning and Greenwood, 2015). 2 Despite their prevalence in recent decisionmaking, the dynamics of trilogue bargaining have received little attention in the study of EU legislative politics, not least due to their informal nature. ...
... During the seventh EP a mere two cases went to conciliation and in the eighth EP all cases were concluded at first or second reading. 3 Yet, due to its similar mode of engagement, studies of conciliation might still be able to inform trilogue researchkeeping a few important differences in mind: First, in conciliation, the Council is represented in full, with representatives of each member state present (Franchino and Mariotto, 2012), whereas informal trilogues rely more heavily on the principle of delegation (Delreux and Laloux, 2017). Second, conciliation compromises are subject to closed rule approval in EP and Council and limited in time and scope (König et al., 2007), whereas trilogues usually take place prior to the first reading and are thus not restricted in time or scope. ...
... In the absence of expert interview data, the study of trilogue decision-making taking actual policy provisions into account is often subject to qualitative analysis (e.g. Delreux and Laloux, 2017;Judge and Earnshaw, 2011). Hermansson and Cross (2016) provide a method of comparing different versions of legislative text throughout the legislative process. ...
Informal trilogue meetings are the main legislative bargaining forum in the European Union, yet their dynamics remain largely understudied in a quantitative context. This article builds on the assumption that the negotiating delegations of the European Parliament and the Council play a two-level game whereby these actors can use their intra-institutional constraint to extract inter-institutional bargaining success. Negotiators can credibly claim that their hands are tied if the members of their parent institutions hold similar preferences and do not accept alternative proposals or if their institution is divided and negotiators need to defend a fragile compromise. Employing a measure of document similarity (minimum edit distance) between an institution's negotiation mandate and the trilogue outcome to measure bargaining success, the analysis supports the hypothesis for the European Parliament, but not for the Council.
... Other actors play an important role in trilogues, such as shadow rapporteurs (Judge and Earnshaw 2011) and committee chairs (Roederer-Rynning and Greenwood , 2017. However, in most of the cases studied the negotiations revolved primarily around rapporteurs and presidencies (e.g., Delreux and Laloux 2018;Dyrhauge 2014). Further, Brandsma (2015) underlined their capacity to speed up or slow down legislative decision-making while Laloux and Delreux (2018) found that they deviate more from their mandates than is strictly necessary for a deal. ...
... Scholars also investigated the interaction between intra-and inter-institutional negotiations. Delreux and Laloux (2018) identified three mechanisms whereby negotiators in trilogues are able to link both to reach a compromise: (1) creating a tied-hand situation; (2) involving the other institution in intra-institutional negotiations; and (3) searching for signals in both institutions in the zone of agreements. Brandsma (2015) argued that internal politicization and contestation influenced the number of trilogue meetings required. ...
Over the last 20 years, the political dynamics in EU legislative policy-making have fundamentally changed as trilogues have become the major forum for legislative negotiations. From this perspective, this article represents a first systematic review of the literature on trilogues by using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. In doing so, it demonstrates the impact of trilogues on EU legislative politics, both intra- and inter-institutionally, as well as the normative concerns they have raised. It also shows that trilogues do not yet constitute uniform practices. Further, this article identifies the limits of our knowledge and therefore avenues for future research to improve our understanding of EU legislative politics.
... This is arguably the clearest case of the rapporteur acting as an agent of the plenary (see e.g. Delreux and Laloux, 2018). ...
... They can thus minimize agency loss for different principals: the EP plenary, the committee, their party group or their own national party. Rapporteurs are usually considered the agent of the EP plenary as a whole, in particular when representing the chamber in inter-institutional negotiations with the Council of the EU in trilogues leading up to OLP legislation (Delreux and Laloux, 2018). However, against the backdrop of the rise in first-reading agreements under the OLP, it has been argued that decision-making authority has shifted from the plenary to the committee level . ...
The European Parliament organizes its legislative activities along two chains of delegation to the rapporteurs – one institutional, one partisan. We analyze discretion and agency loss along these chains of delegation from the perspective of party group coordinators who select the rapporteur on behalf of the party group. Do coordinators minimize agency loss towards their national party, their European party group, the committee median or the plenary median when allocating reports? Data from the 2009–2014 legislative term demonstrate that coordinators tend to select rapporteurs who are close to their own national party’s ideal point on the integration dimension. This has important implications for intra-parliamentary and intra-party delegation, party group cohesion and broader policy-making in the European Union.
... Finally, in a case study on the trilogues on the Market Stability Reserve Decision (2014/0011), Delreux and Laloux (2018) reconstruct how the rapporteur and the Presidency, who both made several concessions on the initial instructions by the principals (confirmed by deviation scores of, respectively, 0,63 and 0,58), succeeded in preserving the support from the principals. Particularly, the rapporteur and the Presidency were constantly checking bilaterally with, respectively, key MEPs and pivotal member states on how far they could go (i.e., how much he could deviate) so that the principals would remain on board. ...
... Losing a coalition member might jeopardize the intra-institutional adoption of the inter-institutional deal. Moreover, in cases of low expressed support, agents can convincingly play a tiedhands strategy and refer to the precarious coalition within their principal as a reason why they cannot deviate to reconcile with their counterpart in trilogues (Delreux and Laloux 2018). Conversely, when the expressed support is broad, we expect that agents can permit themselves to lose some members of the initial coalition, which makes deviation less costlyand thus more likely. ...
This article presents a newly developed ‘deviation index’ to measure, in a quantitative and standardized way, the extent to which the negotiators in trilogues (the rapporteur and the rotating Presidency) deviate from the instructions of the institutions they represent (respectively, the EP and the Council). Based on text-mining techniques, the index is applied to the entire set of trilogue decision-making processes in the 2012–2016 period (N = 111). The article then presents three examples of how the index can generate new insights about legislative policy-making in the EU. These empirical applications show that agents deviate more than minimally required to reach an inter-institutional compromise; that rapporteurs deviate in general more than Presidencies do; and that deviation is not affected by the support for the mandate or by the size of the agent.
... In politicised circumstances, the fate of specific policies therefore rests on the calculation of individual political groups, and on actors in a distinct position to steer the process. For the latter, we know from the 'relais actor' thesis that trilogue participants (for the EP: the rapporteur, committee chair, and to a lesser extent shadow rapporteurs) can control the information flow and thus influence the process and outcome of policy files (Brandsma & Hoppe, 2021;Delreux & Laloux, 2018). In EU trade agreements, where the consent procedure applies, there are no trilogue meetings, but the rapporteur remains the penholder in drafting resolutions on upcoming or ongoing negotiations. ...
... Especially in light of the increased use of early agreements and secluded decision-making in trilogues, this finding is essential, as scholars found that a united front towards the Council can enhance the EP's influence on the legislative output (e.g. Delreux and Laloux, 2018;Finke, 2012). In conclusion, shadows are crucial players who use their expertise and centrality in the policy-making process to shape the committee report and thus the legislative mandate for potential trilogue negotiations. ...
In light of secluded decision-making and early agreements, a binding mandate for the European Parliament’s negotiation team is essential to prevent agency loss in trilogue negotiations. In this article, I investigate the influence of the often-overlooked shadow rapporteurs on this mandate. Shadow rapporteurs are their party group’s representatives and act as checks on the rapporteur. Drawing on novel insights from network analysis, I expect shadow rapporteurs and their stance on EU integration to affect the success of amendments they are sponsoring. I draw on a novel dataset of 1524 committee amendments and employ three-level multinomial logistic regression to test these expectations. I find shadow rapporteurs to be influential policy leaders who successfully shape the committee report and, therefore, mitigate the risk of agency loss in potential trilogues. Shadow rapporteurs can successfully check the rapporteur and thereby influence the content of EU legislation.
... Although the preparatory bodies of the Commission agree on a mandate for the Commission negotiators (Page, 2012;Panning, 2021), trilogues are not only secluded and thus difficult to monitor, but expost sanctions are difficult for the Commission, since it lacks decision-making power. Delreux and Laloux (2018) observed such a situation: Their interviewees suggested that the lead DG, representing the Commission in trilogues, supported several co-legislators' amendments that were more in line with its own preferences than the original Commission proposal, which was the result of intra-institutional compromises. ...
This article aims to examine the effect of intra-institutional conflicts in the European Commission on the extent of changes made to legislative proposals in trilogue negotiations. We develop and test three hypotheses related to how conflicts within the Commission, namely that intra-institutional disagreements during policy formulation (h1), and potential conflicts with previous (h2) or subsequent (h3) colleges of commissioners, increase the number of amendments to the Commission’s proposal adopted in trilogues. To test our hypotheses, we use a new dataset measuring the number of changes between Commission proposals and adopted legislation for 216 legislative acts negotiated between 2012 and 2019 by means of text-mining techniques. It is important to note that we control for differences between the Commission’s proposals and the co-legislators’ positions in order to distinguish between an effect on preferences anticipation and on the negotiations proper. Our results indicate that intra-institutional conflicts affect the Commission’s anticipation of the co-legislators’ positions. The effect on its behaviour in trilogues, that is, after the legislative proposal has been tabled, is less clear. Regarding the latter, only the number of Directorates-General involved is significantly linked with the number of amendments tabled. These findings suggest that while intra-institutional disagreements affect the Commission’s role in trilogues, the range of preferences is more important than the intensity of conflicts.
... Indeed, MEPs may be more inclined to vote for a compromise they do not fully support if they know the concessions were necessary and the gains hard-won; that is, if they think the compromise is the best possible deal for the EP. This supposition is in line with Delreux and Laloux (2018), who showed that negotiators try to transmit the pressures from the inter-institutional forum to their institutions to find a deal. Moreover, MEPs arguably would be more convinced of the justice of a given outcome, and therefore to vote for it, if they were confident their side's position was considered seriously, and this requires transparency. ...
For policies to be legitimate, both the policy process and the underlying reasons must be transparent to the public. In the EU, the lion’s share of legislation is nowadays negotiated in informal secluded meeting called trilogues. Therefore, presentation of the trilogues compromise by the rapporteur to the European Parliament (EP) plenary is, arguably, one of the few formal occasions for ‘transparency in process,’ i.e., public access to the details of actual interactions between policymakers. The aim of this article is thus to examine the extent to which rapporteurs are transparent about trilogue negotiations when presenting legislative compromises to the EP during plenary sessions, and to assess whether the extent of transparency is linked to the extent of conflict between legislative actors and to elements of the political context related to rapporteurs. To this purpose, we coded 176 rapporteur speeches and, on this basis, concluded that these speeches poorly discuss the trilogue negotiations. Interinstitutional negotiations are discussed in only 64% of cases, and even when they are, the extent of information about trilogues is generally small. While we do not find support for an effect of political conflicts, some characteristics linked with rapporteurs are significantly related to transparency in process of their speeches. This is the case for their political affiliation and their national culture of transparence.
... Therefore, the more united Parliament is in co-decision, the more difficult it is for Council to reject its amendments (Finke, 2012). In contrast, if the negotiating team goes into trilogues with a weak majority and has limited room for manoeuvre (in the sense that any divergence from the mandate might preclude winning the vote in plenary), the easier it becomes for the Council to play divide-andconquer (Delreux & Laloux, 2018;Trauner & Ripoll Servent, 2016). ...
With higher levels of polarization in the European Parliament (EP), mainstream groups increasingly face the trade-off between engaging and dismissing Eurosceptic challenger parties. Therefore, this article proposes a model to understand the strategies of mainstream and Eurosceptic groups in legislative work. It uses content analysis of legislative amendments to explain under what conditions these two sets of actors decide to engage with or disengage from each other. We compare two legislative packages, the more technical Circular Economy Package with the highly politicized Asylum Reform Package to assess how the choices of mainstream and Eurosceptic groups influence the survival of amendments and the success of the EP in trilogues. The comparison shows that politicization leads to more polarization and, subsequently, increases the chances that mainstream groups will collaborate with and copy soft-Eurosceptics along a left-right divide. At the same time, we also demonstrate that disengagement from Eurosceptic groups is closely related to their small size and limited resources. Finally, although the cordon sanitaire is systematically used to exclude hard Eurosceptics, it is not effective when it comes to isolating radical populist amendments proposed by soft-Eurosceptics and mainstream groups.
... Whereas empirical research has paid considerable attention to the question of delegation and control by EU member-states (Da Conceicao 2010;Damro 2007;De Bièvre and Dür 2005;Delreux 2011;Delreux and Kerremans 2010;Dür and Elsig 2011;Elsig 2007;Franchino 2007;Kerremans 2006;Pollack 1997aPollack , 1997bPollack , 2003Tallberg 2002), to agency discretion ( Gastinger and Adriaensen 2019), and to dynamics within (or in the context of) principals and agents (Conceição-Heldt 2017;Delreux and Laloux 2018), regions and their possibly peculiar positions in the principal-agent relationships have been neglected, particularly in trade negotiations conducted by the Commission on behalf of the EU. That is remarkable, as at least some regions in the EU have become vocal players on these issues. ...
The EU conducts its external trade policy under close scrutiny by member-states. Yet, what about the role of regional authorities in federal states? To answer, we look at the principal-agent chain of delegation and explore to which extent regions with stakes and competencies in the matter exert control over EU policies. We distinguish three ideal-type roles regions can perform: principals in their own right, members of collective principals, and introduce the new concept of ‘transceivers’. A region can perform the role of principal with formal competencies, as does Flanders, which as one of multiple principals can withhold a Belgian decision. A region can also be one of a collective group of principals, as is the case for the region Hesse. Regions can finally perform the role of a ‘transceiver’ of information from policy-makers to constituencies (and vice versa), akin to the role of endorser, without formal framework for involvement – as does Scotland. Since regions and states alike depend on private sector information, two conclusions prevail. First, despite formal competencies, regions that are members of collective principals struggle becoming the sole interlocutor for the private sector. Second, despite lacking competencies, transceiver-regions are crucial interlocutors complementing member-state control over EU trade policy.
... While a lively debate took off on the validity of this so-called 'relais actor thesis ' (cf., Brandsma 2015;Costello and Thomson 2011;Delreux and Laloux 2018;Farrell and Heritier 2004;Rasmussen and Reh 2013), the EP simultaneously responded to those concerns and changed its rules of procedures a number of times in order to fence in its chief negotiators, and to ensure broad participation from multiple political groups, committee chairs and members present in plenary (cf., Héritier and Reh 2012). The Council left its rules for conducting trilogues untouched. ...
Significant parts of the EU’s legislative process remain shrouded in secrecy. In informal trilogues, representatives of the three main institutions negotiate compromises behind closed doors which are subsequently rubber-stamped in public meetings. While most research on (EU) transparency focuses on the availability of documents, this article investigates how much information on trilogue proceedings is shared with the general public through European Parliament (EP) committee meetings as the only forum to which public account must be rendered during the negotiation process. This article analyses the degree to which trilogues are reported back on, and the quality of feedback provided. Although the EP requires its trilogue negotiators to report back to its committees after each trilogue, the majority of trilogues is not reported back on at all, or not in time. Where feedback is given, its quality is often only poor. The EP thus does not deliver on its promises, which seriously undermines the legitimacy of the EU’s legislative process.
... The mere expression of interest can thus suffice to constrain agent actions, at least to a certain extent. In fact, agents require signals from principals to learn about their 'zones of possible agreement' (Delreux and Laloux, 2018) and for rational anticipation to work successfully. In the absence of such signals, even an entirely neutral agent may attempt to rationally anticipate the principals' preferences but simply misinterpret them. ...
How much discretion does the Commission enjoy in the European Union? To address this question, we draw on principal–agent theory and propose ‘interest in a decision’ by principals as a proxy for agent discretion. This has three advantages over existing approaches. First, it overcomes the high‐conflict bias of case studies. Second, it accounts for the phenomenon of rational anticipation. Third, it allows for a more fine‐grained measurement than analyses of the act of delegation. Empirically, we disaggregate the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) into 27 chapters and account for multiple principals. We use surveys and interviews with Commission negotiators, which we triangulate with publicly available data sources. Our findings paint a picture of a Commission that is constrained rather tightly. While the Council follows all chapters and acts as a ‘safety net’, citizens and the European Parliament act as fire alarms and focus on selected, often overlapping, chapters.
This article examines the paradigm shifts in the European Union's (EU's) climate policy from 2009 to 2022 looking closer at the main policy instrument of EU's climate policy, the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). The paradigm shifts of the EU ETS are linked to the climate policy paradigms prometheanism/growth unlimited (PGU), ecological modernization (EM), and sufficiency. The question of how ideas have shaped EU climate policy and the EU ETS in the past decade is answered, with the establishment of the EM paradigm and moving toward the sufficiency paradigm. There is a need for more research looking closer at how this paradigm shift impacts legislation for climate policy going forward.
Difference between social science analyses of law and legal analyses – Theatre metaphor to understand the difference – Internal and external points of view – Necessity for legal analysis to use materials lying outside the classical pyramid of formal sources – Overview of the spectrum of legal research – Legally relevant texts and practices – Interdisciplinary approaches to law and lawyers’ disciplinary edge.
Since its constitution in 1979, the composition of the European Parliament (EP) has changed considerably. One notable evolution is the progressive but steady increase in the number of female MEPs: between 1979 and 2019 this number has risen from 15.2percent to 39.5percent. Therefore, the EP is defined in the literature as one of the most feminized Parliaments in Europe. But we find a gap in the literature when it comes to career chances of specifically female MEPs. Studying female MEPs in top positions in the European Parliament between 1994 and 2021, we raise the question to which extent women are granted access to rapporteurships and committee chairs in the EP over time. Leading questions are: Did the number of women in top positions change over time accordingly with the increase of their overall number in Parliament? And do group membership, member state affiliation, political experience and time influence the chances of women of women over time? To answer this, a unique dataset has been created which covers all MEPs in top positions in the EP including their pre and post EP offices as well as the political career within the EP itself. Top positions studied in this paper are committee chairs and rapporteurs (N = 3654 MEPs). The paper analyses the access to these positions based on four explanatory levels: party, country, individual political experience and time. The results of the multivariate regression and survival analysis show that there is even a slight overrepresentation of female rapporteurs. More generally, we find no statistically significant difference between men and women when it comes to the allocation to committee chairs but female MEPs from larger member states are more likely to get one than women from smaller member states.
Individual amendments at the committee stage offer Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) a valuable tool to change legislation, prior to its passage at the plenary stage. And until a recent rule change, they were also one of the last meaningful ways for MEPs to self-select into the EP legislative process. Applying theories of legislative organization, internal positions, and differences in national institutional background, we use novel data to examine why MEPs proposed amendments to select EP committees during a one-year period between October 2015 and 2016. Our findings address a remaining gap on the individual determinants for legislative behavior in the EP, while also highlighting the effects of uneven prestige and contestation found in the EP committee system.
Every constitution needs to set out rules for the production of its laws. Legislation refers to the making of laws and is central for democracies to assure collective self-determination. Legislation is also fundamental to preserve liberty as Montesquieu observed for states more than 250 years ago: “In a free state, every man who is considered a free citizen ought to be governed by himself. Hence, the people as a body should have legislative power.” (De l’Esprit des lois, 1748, XI.6, p. 331) In large societies this requires to have representatives who discuss matters of common concern and express the general will. For the European Union, the ordinary legislative procedure is the most important method for producing laws. This article shows that the Treaty of Lisbon introduced a formal conception of legislation. The ordinary legislative procedure is governed by a series of procedural principles which determine the relation between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission as its main actors. While the Treaties define a formal sequence to adopt legislation, negotiations take place in informal Trilogues between these three institutions. In addition to the procedural principles, the legislative acts adopted must adhere to substantive principles related to their content.
This conclusion to the special issue reflects on the evolution of European integration since the early 1990s in order to better understand the contested origins of the Treaty of Lisbon and the consequences the latter have had for the EU’s political system. It considers the various contributions of the special issue and shows how the Treaty emerged in an era of shifting cleavages, disputed steps towards a more political Union and rising populism. This legacy has led to more polarisation and politicisation – a phenomenon that the Treaty of Lisbon struggles to encapsulate and conciliate with the culture of consensus and compromise inherent to its institutional structures. As a result, we observe a bias towards policy stability – and even failure – that affects the legitimacy and democratic standards of the European Union. In a context of polycrisis, the difficulty to find compromises – especially in highly normative issues – leads to the de-politicisation of the EU and reinforces the gap between EU institutions and its citizens. The COVID-19 pandemic is a window of opportunity for the EU, in which to choose between integration and disintegration; between values and inaction.
The European Commission has been active in proposing legislation on the exchange of information on Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs) in the field of energy, pushing for an ex ante control mechanism which most member states have been reluctant to accept. This article aims to explain the extent to which and the conditions under which the Commission has been able to achieve its IGAs objectives. It argues that they have been achieved to a considerable extent due to the ability of the Commission to build on its agenda‐setting powers and the preference alignment of member states. The article offers a thorough analysis of two consecutive legislative processes: the first leading to Decision 994/2012 and the second repealing the former and leading to Decision 2017/684. The analysis builds on legislative documents, secondary sources and data collected during two rounds of interviews in 2013 and 2018.
The role of the Commission in inter-institutional relations, especially in trilogue negotiations, is usually described as that of an ‘honest broker’ mediating between the co-legislators. While this understanding is widely accepted, we do not know what being an honest broker actually means in practice. How does the Commission form its positions for trilogue negotiations? Does the Commission’s honest-broker-image reflect its practical role in inter-institutional position formation processes? Based on actor-centred institutionalism, the paper explores two preparatory bodies in the Commission, the ‘Groupe de relations interinstitutionelle’ (GRI) and the pre-GRI. Preparatory bodies have been largely overseen in the literature, but have become key fora in which actors form their positions and mediate intra- and inter-institutional conflict. This paper uses ethnographic data provided by participant observation and elite interviews to explore these bodies. The findings depict the Commission rather as a committed than neutral broker; willing to mediate while ensuring it has a strong position.
Trilogues are the main forum for legislative negotiation in the EU. In trilogues, each co-legislator is represented by negotiators, who therefore play a central role in the current EU legislative process. This paper examines whether trilogues enable negotiators therein to slack by deviating more from the mandates they receive when they disagree with their institutions. The extent of deviation is measured using text-mining techniques for 219 negotiations conducted between 2012 and 2018. As a main result, the analysis does not reveal evidence that deviation in trilogues is significantly linked to principal-agent disagreement, neither in the EP, nor in the Council. In other words, the extent of deviation in trilogues does not appear to be the result of negotiators defending positions that are not representative of those of their institutions. This result thus contributes allaying the normative concerns expressed regarding the non-representativity of trilogues compromises, and therefore of EU legislation.
Rapporteurs in the European Parliament are influential figures, drafting reports, preparing and collecting amendments and negotiating files on behalf of Parliament as a whole. Previous studies have shown a persistent under‐representation of MEPs from the post‐2004 accession states among rapporteurs. In this study, we demonstrate the evolution of this disparity. Although it no longer exists at the surface, MEPs from accession states are still very much under‐represented in the allocation of files that are negotiated with the Council using trilogues – leaving them mostly with prime responsibility for short and relatively uncomplicated files. This shows that unequal representation has taken on a more subtle guise than before, with ‘west‐European’ MEPs still firmly in the driving seat.
Principal–agent analyses have been frequently applied by scholars of the European Union (EU). The model helps to explain the reasons, modalities, and consequences of the delegation of authority from one (set of) actor(s)—the principal—to another (set of) actor(s)—the agent. Instances of delegation are omnipresent in the EU: not only is the EU founded upon the delegation of rule-making powers from the member states to the supranational level (European integration), but delegation is also frequently occurring from one actor or institution to another within the political system of the EU (EU decision-making).
Assuming that institutions are forums for strategic behavior by rational actors, the principal–agent model has advanced our understanding of European integration and EU politics by zooming in on contractual, dyadic relationships that are characterized by an act of delegation and the controls established to minimize the risks related to delegation. Principal–agent analyses can be used to address two types of questions: first, on why and how the principal delegates authority to the agent (i.e., the “politics of delegation”), and second, on the ensuing game between the principal and the agent when the latter executes the delegated task on behalf of the former (i.e., the “politics of discretion,” or “post-delegation politics”).
Principal–agent analyses in the field of EU politics have been conducted using a diverse set of methods and research designs, with large-N quantitative studies on how principals control their agent, over in-depth case studies of the formers’ motives for delegation, to more recent attempts to capture post-delegation politics and the agent’s discretion in a systematic and quantitative way. Under the condition that the principal–agent model is applied carefully and for questions on the politics of delegation and the politics of discretion, it remains a useful tool to understand contemporary EU politics.
European Union legislative decision-making is increasingly shifted into informal secluded arenas. Scholars have explained this trend and analysed its consequences for bargaining success and democratic legitimacy. Yet, we know little about how informalisation affects legislative behaviour in the European Parliament. This article contributes to closing the gap, by theorising and analysing the impact of ‘early agreements’ on cohesion. Given the reputational, political and transaction costs of failing an early agreement in plenary, we expect political groups to invest heavily in discipline and consensus, and legislators to comply in votes. Using a new dataset, combining Hix et al.’s (2007) roll-call data with original codecision data (1999–2011), we show that informalisation increases cohesion but only for centrist parties. Rapporteurships and votes on ‘costly’ legislative resolutions also matter, but do not mediate the effect of early agreement.
We argue that one prime source of Commission autonomy in bilateral trade negotiations was the informational advantage that it acquired during the pre-negotiations, which is the phase preceding the adoption of negotiating directives by the Council. Initially, the Commission was entirely unmonitored owing to the lack of Treaty provisions applying to this stage in the negotiations. The Commission used this information asymmetry strategically vis-à-vis the Council to move outcomes closer to its ideal point. Later, member states have stepped up police-patrol monitoring manifesting itself empirically through two different channels. First, they have shifted the institutional arena for more political aspects to annual ministerial meetings. Second, preparatory works on a technical level are today followed by national experts. We examine this argument by adopting a principal–agent perspective and against the backdrop of EU–India relations.
Decision-making between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament is characterized by a paradox. On the one hand, there is a high potential for inter-institutional conflict. Historically, the EP and the Council have been opponents in the struggle for power. In addition, both institutions can be said to fulfill different representational roles within the political system of the EU, with the Council representing the member states and the Parliament representing the citizens. Furthermore, agreement between the two is complicated by decision rules posing high thresholds for agreement and actors with often diverging preferences. On the other hand, in day-to-day policy-making, the Council and the European Parliament display a high level of consensus and decision-making efficiency. Most legislation is decided in first reading, and early agreements provide a shortcut for cumbersome inter- institutional negotiations. To shed light on this paradox, we conceptualize the mechanisms and dynamics underlying inter-institutional cooperation and conflict by taking recourse to factors derived from historical, sociological and rational choice institutionalisms. We argue that the same logics which account for conflict also contain the explanation for cooperation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that each of the theoretical approaches is particularly well suited to highlight a certain aspect of the paradox.
This article focuses on the way the EU operates in negotiations leading to an international agreement, which touches upon competences shared between the EC and the member states. More specifically, the article addresses the EU decision-making process and the EU negotiation arrangement with regard to multilateral chemicals conventions. A principal–agent model is used to frame theoretically the relation between the member states and the EU negotiator. This model is adapted to mixed agreements and supplemented with ‘private information for the principals’, ‘cost of no agreement’ and the ‘compellingness of the external environment’. Its application to the EU decision-making process regarding the Rotterdam PIC Convention and the Stockholm POPs Convention shows that the EU managed to speak with a single voice, that the EU negotiation arrangement was organized in rather an ad hoc way and that the member states mainly used the ad locum control mechanisms to limit the discretion of the EU negotiator.
More and more legislative decisions are reached in early stages of the co‐decision procedure through informal negotiations among representatives of the EU institutions. This study argues that the European Parliament has an advantage in such negotiations relative to the Council due to the latter’s limited organizational resources to handle the increased legislative workload under the co‐decision procedure. The main implication of this theoretical argument is that the Parliament’s impact on the content of legislation should be higher when informal negotiations are conducted rather than when agreement is reached at the end of the procedure in conciliation. To examine this claim, a quantitative comparative study of the success of the Parliament’s amendments in two legislative decision‐making processes in the field of transport was conducted. The results reveal that the EP’s influence during co‐decision is indeed larger in the case of an early agreement.
Little is known about the effects of the inter-institutional linkages created through the establishment of the codecision procedure on decision-making in the Council of the European Union. After a review of the existing literature and theories on this topic, we examine to what extent the codecision procedure leads to more involvement of ministers in Council decision-making and to a more powerful position of the Presidency in the internal negotiation process of the Council. The results show that the initially positive effect of codecision on the politicization of Council decision-making has been offset in recent years by a growing lack of transparency in inter-institutional proceedings caused by the use of informal trialogue negotiations to conclude the procedure early. However, our study also suggests that the country holding the Presidency does not occupy a more privileged position in the Council’s internal co-operation network as a result of these developments. Thus, with respect to the Council, informal inter-institutional negotiation practices seem to decrease the transparency of the decision-making process and the accountability of the actors involved, but they may not have as adverse an effect on who gets what in terms of policy as previously thought.
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 files in the Sixth European Parliament. Drawing from functionalist institutionalism, distributive bargaining theory, and sociological institutionalism, this article explains under what conditions informal decision making is likely to occur. The authors test their hypotheses on an original data set of all 797 codecision files negotiated between mid-1999 and mid-2009. Their analysis suggests that fast-track legislation is systematically related to the number of participants, legislative workload, and complexity. These findings back a functionalist argument, emphasizing the transaction costs of intraorganizational coordination and information gathering. However, redistributive and salient acts are regularly decided informally, and the Council presidency's priorities have no significant effect on fast-track legislation. Hence, the authors cannot confirm explanations based on issue properties or actors' privileged institutional positions. Finally, they find a strong effect for the time fast-track legislation has been used, suggesting socialization into interorganizational norms of cooperation.
What impact do leaders in the European Parliament's (EP) committees have on the EP's opinions? This study formulates and tests expectations about the conditions under which rapporteurs influence the EP's opinions and also about what factors motivate that influence. In line with the informational theory of legislative committees, the most important factor affecting the EP's opinion is the policy position of the median MEP, not a characteristic of the rapporteur. Nonetheless, the evidence shows that rapporteurs influence the EP's opinions when legislative proposals are subject to early agreements under the co-decision procedure and when the consultation procedure applies. Rapporteurs' influence is motivated primarily by national interests, rather than by the interests of their EP party groups.
This article examines why and how agents weaken the incentives to control of their principals when the EU negotiates international agreements. Based on analyses of various EU decision-making processes on international trade and environmental agreements, this article argues that the EU negotiator-as-agent has a number of tools to affect the cost-benefit analysis on the basis of which the member states-as-principals decide on the activation of their control mechanisms. In order to avoid that the member states reject the international agreement reached by the EU negotiator (the Commission and/or the Presidency), the latter needs to reduce the range of behavioural options of the former. Three strategic paths are available to the agent to weaken its principals' control incentives: (a) calibrating the member states' involvement in the international negotiations, (b) being the first mover in determining its own instructions, and (c) exploiting the inconclusiveness among the member states.
This book studies the relationship between administrative capacity and a member state’s influence in the European Union. More specifically, it studies member states’ ability to exert control over the European Commission during trade negotiations. But what determines administrative capacity and how do member states ensure their preferences are defended during trade negotiations? A combination of qualitative fieldwork and survey-analysis provides the answer. Interviews in Belgium, Poland, Estonia and Spain offer a privileged insight into the functioning of national trade administrations and its effects on their behavior in the Council of Ministers. Through survey data, these findings are further corroborated. The book is aimed at a readership interested in EU decision-making, negotiation theory, comparative public administration and the international political economy of trade.
This article examines the institutionalization of the European Parliament-as-a-legislature. It draws on the political development scholarship to conceptualize institutionalization and highlight the role of the environment in the development and decay of political institutions. On this premise, we argue that the political significance of the European Parliament (EP) depends on its capacity to develop strong institutions enabling it to ‘exist apart’ from its environment. We identify the embrace of codecision as a critical moment of the institutionalization of the EP-as-a-legislature and explore the value of the political development perspective in a comparative-historical study of trilogues in the EP. We present a typology of institutionalization of trilogues and argue that a model of generic parliamentary approach to trilogues is taking roots. While substantiating the thesis of the EP as a potentially autonomous institution, our findings also call for research into the resilience and sources of institutional patterns of trilogues.
The thesis develops a theory of legislative cooperation in bicameral legislatures. At its core is a distinction between two decision-making scenarios leading to a concurrent majority in the two chambers. In an inter-institutional scenario, the chambers oppose each other as unitary actors. In a trans-institutional scenario, the
constituent actors enter into cooperation across the boundaries of their chambers. The central argument is that formateurs face a strategic decision on which of these two routes to take. They can stick to their intra-institutional coalition, or they can abandon it and propose a logroll across issues within a bill that is carried by a majority across the chambers.
The thesis comprises three papers, united by the general topic of trans-institutional legislative cooperation, and each demonstrating the crucial role of the formateurs. The empirical analysis focuses on co-decision legislation proposed in the bicameral system of the European Union between 1999 and 2009. In particular, it draws on a new dataset on early-stage and final-stage coalitions in the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. This is based on an extensive analysis of more than 18,000 Council documents and 19,000 amendments in the EP presenting for the first time a systematic insight into early-stage coalitions.
Three central findings emanate from the application of the theoretical framework to the new data. First, formateurs can obtain an outcome closer to their preferences by choosing between inter- and trans-institutional scenarios. Second, the transaction costs of exchanges across institutional boundaries are lower if formateurs’
preferences are similar. Third, the decisions of the formateurs potentially produce winners and losers as some actors are included and others are excluded from the coalitions. These findings build on and further develop theories of bicameral coalition formation and legislative organisation. They highlight that the strategic
environment in which actors operate surpasses their individual chamber, and explain how this affects the process and outcome of decision-making. This leads to important empirical and theoretical contributions which raise normative implications.
According to the logic of standard veto bargaining models with complete information, bargaining in the European Union should never reach the second reading of the ordinary legislative procedure (co-decision). Even so, non-agreement at the first reading occurs frequently in European Union decision making. How can this be explained? Drawing upon game theory on bargaining with incomplete information, two specific predictions with regard to the occurrence of first-reading non-agreements can be generated. First-reading agreements are less likely to occur (1) the greater the distance between the ideal point of the Council and the ideal point of the European Parliament and (2) the greater the salience attached to the proposal. This article combines positional and proposal-specific data and finds robust support for both hypotheses in two different empirical tests.
There is surprisingly little knowledge about the informal ‘trilogues’ that play a pivotal role in almost 90 per cent of European Union legislation. This article maps out previously uncharted practices and explores their role in constituting the Parliament and Council as legislators. It proceeds by taking stock of the knowledge that actors in Parliament, the Council and the Commission have acquired and use to make sense of, and act in, trilogues. Our findings qualify the widespread belief that trilogues have drawn Parliament into unfamiliar territory of diplomatic culture, at a cost to political efficacy and democratic functions. Trilogues today are underpinned by norms, standard operating procedures and practices linking formal and informal institutions. They have imparted Parliament with a sharpened consciousness of its role and identity as a ‘normal’ parliament, while leaving the Council frustrated and less confident. Parliament has seen in norms of public accountability a means to develop leverage over the Council.
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.
Agreements concerning inter-institutional rules in the treaties of the European Union often give rise to reactions and processes of adaptation within the EU institutions. Recent literature on EU legislative politics has increasingly examined decision-making within the EU institutions, but has largely overlooked how these internal processes react and adapt to changes in relations between the EU bodies. To fill this gap the authors present a series of empirical studies that examine how shifts in inter-institutional rules and procedures affect intra-institutional politics. They show that the resulting intra-institutional adaptations may in turn both have distributive consequences and affect the efficiency of the initial inter-institutional reforms. In addition, they provide some stepping stones for theory-building on how treaty reforms affect organisational structure and decision-making within the EU institutions by outlining a series of mediating variables that link these two types of change processes.
How to manage a successful Council presidency continues to be a subject for debate. The literature has come a long way in identifying the roles and tasks of the presidencies. The debate is about the powers they have and the normative constraints they face while performing these roles. This paper focuses on how presidencies can effectively manage internal Council debates. We suggest a three-step mechanism that links performance to success. We subsequently perform a process tracing analysis of five Council presidencies and assess their relative performance in one (prioritized) issue area: the EU's Balkan enlargement policies. We argue that success depends on the fit between the Chair's and the Council's consecutive moves, in which the former has a first mover disadvantage. This explains why it has proven so difficult for presidencies to fulfil the roles that, with hindsight, were required.
This contribution develops a framework for evaluating the legitimacy of codecision. It uses democratic theory to clarify the role of legislative procedures in securing the legitimacy of political systems. It shows how that role requires public control with political equality and public justification. It uses that standard to show how legislative agenda-setting, Council voting weights, European Parliament elections and seat apportionments, national parliamentary scrutiny, justificatory practices, and control of judicial and administrative rule-making all affect the legitimacy of codecision. Overall the contribution concludes that the legitimacy of codecision is part of a predicament that can only be managed, not solved.
One of the most important changes in the history of codecision has been the steep increase in early agreements since 1999. Early agreements have enhanced the efficiency of European Union legislation, but they have been criticized for giving a subset of actors disproportionate control over the legislative agenda and negotiation process. Yet, no study has systematically shown whether and how early agreements have indeed redistributed influence between actors within the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Our contribution fills this gap by comparing actors’ bargaining success across readings under codecision in a dataset of salient files. Contrary to our theoretical predictions, we do not find evidence of distributional consequences when controlling for inter-institutional conflict and file characteristics. Where codecision is concluded early, the final legislative outcomes are not located closer to the policy positions held by the party group of the Parliament's rapporteur or by the Council Presidency.
The processing of the advanced therapies regulation is of particular interest to scholars of the European Union's (EU) legislative process and students of the European Parliament (EP) because it provides a case study which throws light upon assumptions commonly made about the role of the EP's 'relais actors', the promotion of consensus-building within and between parliamentary committees, and the development of intraorganizational rules in response to early agreements in the co-decision procedure. An examination of the EP's processing of the advanced therapies dossier provides an 'unusual' but vivid illustration of how the identification of committee rapporteurs as the most important parliamentary 'relais actors' fails to capture the increasingly important roles performed by shadow rapporteurs. Significantly, the 'unusual' occurrences associated with the processing of the advanced therapies regulation came at a crucial juncture in the reconsideration of the EP's intraorganizational rules in relation to early agreements and the subsequent adoption of new Rules of Procedure in 2009.
Transport is one of the most polluting sectors and needs to adopt environmental protection, yet the constant struggle between the environment and the economy is often won by economic priorities. This struggle makes environmental policy integration difficult, especially in the legislative process. This article analyzes the co-decision process which led to the adoption of the 2011 Eurovignette Directive, and examines how intra-organizational conflicts in the European Parliament and the Council shaped inter-organizational negotiations and thus the level of environmental policy integration in the adopted policy. The European Parliament's rapporteur is identified as central for resolving differences between the actors. Overall, the paper argues that the economic crisis has strengthened existing national economic preferences over environmental protection, leading to environmental policy integration that is symbolic rather than substantial.
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 informalised legislative decision-making, transformed inter-organisational relations, and induced power shifts. It then discusses the political response, showing that actors seek to redress power shifts, that reform attempts centre on the control of negotiation authority and information flows, and that reform is highly contested. The research suggests that the chance of successful redress is low in Parliament as a decentralised organisation unless two conditions are met: (i) the extent of fast-track legislation reaches a critical level, and (ii) the organisation goes through a period of wider reform; the former increases the visibility of disempowerment and reputational loss, the latter allows package deals and/or the strategic use of norms. Based on qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews an analysis is made of how Parliament’s rules of co-legislation have been contested, negotiated and reformed from the formal introduction of fast-track legislation in 1999 to the adoption of the Code of Conduct for Negotiating in the Context of Codecision Procedures in 2009. The analysis also shows that Parliament may have a price to pay for its successful fight for empowerment, namely a challenge to its institutional legitimacy and discontent of its of rank-and-file members. More generally, understanding the conditions for intra-organisational reform can inform the study of other democratic bodies which undergo a similar restriction and seclusion of de facto decision-making.
Since the introduction of the co‐decision procedure by way of the Maastricht Treaty, the procedure has been transformed considerably. One of the most striking innovations is the possibility to adopt a legislative act in first reading. This article aims to answer the questions whether the increasing use of this fast track procedure is in line with Treaty provisions and/or intra/inter‐institutional rules, and what the effects are of these stipulations. The empirical findings presented in this study indicate that two reasons for taking the fast track gain dominance in the practical political process, ie the political priorities of the Council and European Parliament (EP) and whether these actors consider a legislative file as urgent. From a study of two directives, it becomes clear that this dominance of factors has consequences for the type of early agreement reached (first or early second), the quality of the adopted legislation and its implementation at the national level.
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, will lead to changes in individual actors’ respective influence over outcomes within organizations. Certain individuals controlling information flows between organizations will see an increase in their power over legislative outcomes. This begs the question of how organizations will respond to these shifts in the power balance among the individual actors that constitute them. The authors argue that collective actors that centralize coordination over dealings with external actors will respond effectively through internal rule change. In contrast, collective actors with multiple, ill-coordinated links to other organizations will find it difficult to change internal rules. The authors empirically explore the general argument by analyzing the relationship between the Council and the European Parliament in the process of codecision and its implications for intraorganizational processes.
This article argues that the Presidency of the Council of Ministers plays a crucial leadership role in policy making negotiations in the Council of the European Union (EU). The analysis begins with a detailed description of leadership resources available to the Presidency. Sufficient resources of coercion, reward, legitimacy, socialization, expertise and information exist to support the thesis that the Presidency plays a major role. Based on these findings, the most effective leadership strategy of the Presidency is defined as guiding the negotiating parties toward the achievement of common ends through a cooperative process. Further study reveals that a more sophisticated understanding of leadership can be developed by linking strategies to leadership contexts. The paper concludes that the Presidency has the potential to play an effective leadership role and that the interplay between different sources of leadership is important to understanding the dynamics of multilateral negotiation.
Recent literature on the European Parliament has focused on its powers arising from the co-operation and codecision procedures, although little attention has been paid as to who exercises this power. Rapporteurs are appointed to draft parliamentary reports on proposed legislation during the committee stages before presenting them to the plenary, negotiating across political groups and with the Commission and Council in order to maximize consensus and the influence of Parliament if inter-institutional bargaining takes place.;>Case studies contribute to an analysis of the role of rapporteurs. The extent to which rapporteur self-selection occurs, according to the specific preferences of potential rapporteurs, is also assessed. This allows us to conclude which parties and nationalities value the allocation of reports and consequently have an impact on the content of European legislation.
This paper takes stock of the growing body of research on the European Union (EU) Presidency, a vital player in EU negotiations. The paper also suggests new avenues of research, among which we prioritize one issue cluster: we ask under what conditions and in what way (following which social logic) norms guide Presidency behaviour? Our focus is directed towards the impartiality norm as that norm most strongly influences whether, and to what extent, Presidencies act as a ‘broker’, one of the Presidency functions that has received most attention in the literature. We also suggest a number of pointers concerning methodology and operationalization of the above question for empirical research. We conclude with some brief thoughts on the implications of our proposed approach to Presidency norms for bridge-building between rationalist and sociological accounts.
This study suggests a key element of the principal-agent relationship involves communication between potential principals and their agents. We suggest communications often resemble a signaling process in which potential principals indicate their interest in policy matters through multiple venues. This study models changes in the levels of rulemaking activity by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as a function of increased salience in public, congressional and executive venues.
Who in the European Union drives the process of pursuing bilateral trade negotiations? In contrast to societal explanations, this article develops a novel argument as to how the European Commission manages the process and uses its position in strategic ways to pursue its interests. Rooted in principal–agent theory, the article discusses agent preferences and theorizes the conditions under which the agent sets specific focal points and interacts strategically with principals and third parties. The argument is discussed with case study evidence drawn from the first trade agreement concluded and ratified since the EU Commission announced its new strategy in 2006: the EU–South Korea trade agreement.
Time choices are a neglected aspect of the bicameral bargaining literature, even though they may both affect the efficiency of decision-making and have broader democratic implications. An analytical framework is developed to explain when early conclusion occurs in the legislative process. Testing the main implications of this model on the co-decision procedure of the European Union, the results offer a more positive view of early agreements in this system than the existing literature. The findings show that these deals are unlikely to occur when the European Parliament is represented by agents with biased views of the overall legislature. The conventional wisdom that the character of the negotiated files plays a role in explaining whether legislative files are concluded early is also rejected. Instead, bargaining uncertainty and the impatience of the co-legislators matter.
Domestic politics and international relations are often inextricably entangled, but existing theories (particularly “state-centric” theories) do not adequately account for these linkages. When national leaders must win ratification (formal or informal) from their constituents for an international agreement, their negotiating behavior reflects the simultaneous imperatives of both a domestic political game and an international game. Using illustrations from Western economic summitry, the Panama Canal and Versailles Treaty negotiations, IMF stabilization programs, the European Community, and many other diplomatic contexts, this article offers a theory of ratification. It addresses the role of domestic preferences and coalitions, domestic political institutions and practices, the strategies and tactics of negotiators, uncertainty, the domestic reverberation of international pressures, and the interests of the chief negotiator. This theory of “two-level games” may also be applicable to many other political phenomena, such as dependency, legislative committees, and multiparty coalitions.
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