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The origins of EU legislation: agenda-setting, intra-institutional decision-making or interinstitutional negotiations?
Abstract
This article traces the origins of European legislation during the legislative policy-making process. It identifies three phases where parts of the text of legislative acts can be developed: (1) agenda-setting; (2) intra-institutional decision-making and (3) interinstitutional negotiations, depending on whether the content of the legislation originates respectively in the Commission proposal, the co-legislators’ positions or trilogue negotiations. Using a newly developed text-mining technique which computes in which phase each word of a legislative act originally appears, the article examines the relative importance of each phase and explores how it is affected by interinstitutional conflict. Applying this method to 219 legislative acts adopted between 2012 and 2018, it finds that most EU legislation originates in the agenda-setting phase, and that the new content developed during trilogue negotiations is limited. However, the importance of the agenda-setting phase decreases in cases with high levels of interinstitutional conflict.
... While these studies shed light on the distribution of power among the EU institutions, they all bear important empirical limitations: (1) practitioners may not have the same understanding of power as academics, (2) parliamentary amendments do not reflect the informal negotiations among actors and do not distinguish between formal and substantive changes, and (3) formal models and trilogue studies do not capture all the stages of the legislationmaking process. In addition, they tend to focus only on one institution, with most of the studies analysing the EP (Kreppel, 2002) or the Council (Thomson, 2011(Thomson, , 2015, or only on certain stages of the legislative procedure, either the formal or the informal negotiations (for some exceptions see Laloux & Delreux, 2020;Thomson, 2015). ...
... Peterson employs vector word embeddings to analyse Congressional modification of legislation (Peterson, 2017). Laloux and Delreux (2020) compute the percentage of words that appear at each phase of the legislative process to trace the origin of EU legislation. ...
... Trilogues have become the main mechanism for inter-institutional legislative negotiations, and they can persistently and systematically depart from formal rules (Brandsma, 2019;Farrell & Héritier, 2003;Kleine, 2013;Reh et al., 2013;Thomson, 2015). However, despite an increased academic interest in informal practices since their emergence in the early (Laloux & Delreux, 2020;Thomson, 2015) research into trilogues focused on each institution, with most of the studies analysing the EP, failing to integrate informal practices into the whole EU legislative decision-making process. This is mainly due to the lack of data. ...
The article presents a dataset on the legislative procedure in European Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and a new method of data processeing. The dataset contains information on 529 procedures proposed between January 1998 and December 2017. For each of the legislative proposals, the dataset identifies the main elements of the legislative procedure (e.g., dates, types of procedure, directory codes and subcodes, actors, voting results, amendments, legal basis, etc.) and the changes introduced at each step of the legislative process from the text proposed by the European Commission to the final version published in the Official Journal of the European Union . This information has been gathered using text mining techniques. The dataset is relevant for a broad range of research questions regarding the EU decision-making process in JHA related to the balance of powers between European institutional actors and their capacity to influence the legislative outputs.
... Accordingly, cabinets draft their policy proposals in a more complex language when they face a bicameral, instead of a unicameral decision-making situation and the magnitude of the effect hinges on the cabinet-internal costs of policy formulation. This finding complements earlier studies which have shown that the Commission's quality of legislative anticipation is severely constrained when the EP is involved under co-decision/OLP (Rauh, 2021;Laloux & Delreux, 2021). Accordingly, we can conclude that the Commission is responsive to pressures induced by the EU's institutional framework at the policy formulation stage. ...
... First, it is still unclear how the complexity of the initial policy proposal evolves after the policy formulation stage. Some studies have investigated how institutional and political factors influence the degree to which the Commission's proposals are changed by the other legislative institutions (Rauh, 2021;Cross & Hermansson, 2017;Laloux & Delreux, 2021). Future studies could add to this line of research by exploring the extent to which changes in text similarity imply changes in policy complexity. ...
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
... It is noteworthy that, on average, almost two thirds of the text of any EU legislation originates in the agenda-setting phase (Laloux & Delreux, 2021). The process of drafting a legislative proposal by the EC includes external consultations and the preparation of an impact assessment. ...
The article emphasises the complementarity of research based on voting power theory with the analysis of the structure of blocking. Combining both methods enables a more comprehensive assessment of the vote weighting system in the Council of the EU, in particular the impact of changes in the voting system on the position of individual Member States and the power balance in this institution. I make two contributions to the existing literature. Firstly, the study develops a non-random voting model, dedicated to QMV in the Council, which abandons the assumption that each coalition of players is equally likely and takes into account the role of the European Commission as an agenda-setter. This not only allows us to exclude many coalitions that are only theoretically possible, but also to analyse the blocking structure from the perspective of different states or coalitions in the Council. Secondly, it shows that the application of blocking structure analysis provides novel insights into the Council’s voting system. Unlike the a priori voting power approach, such analysis does not focus on distribution of winning power in the Council, but on the Member States’ ability to build minimal blocking coalitions. Hence, it complements the application of mathematical indices of voting power in the assessment of the voting system in this institution.
... In line with the argument of Laloux and Delreux (2020) that in many important respects the recitals are an integral part of the legislative act, alongside the articles themselves, and that consequently amendments to them should be taken into account, we use the whole body of the legislative act, i.e., the recitals and the articles of the proposal. To compare between legislative files of different length the distance between a Commission proposal and the final compromise was standardised, dividing the number of editing operations by the total number of words in the Commission proposals. ...
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.
This paper examines the impact of Brexit on the voting system in the Council. For this purpose, the study is developing a new voting model which abandons the assumption that each coalition of players is equally likely. The analysis focuses on the structure of blocking for the voting game. I find that for seven most populous Member States, Brexit has had profound effects on their ability to build minimal blocking coalitions in the Council when QMV is used. The Germany’s ability to build the smallest blocking coalitions has increased dramatically. The position of Italy and Spain, and consequently that of the Mediterranean states, has also been strengthening. Moreover, France has become a pivotal player in the disputes between the North and the South. These findings have important implications for institutional design, negotiations between Member States in the Council and the European Commission’s legislative influence as an agenda-setter.
The introduction of the Spitzenkandidaten process has sparked a rich debate on the implications for the ‘input side’ of EU democracy. In contrast, a limited attention has been devoted to the corresponding ‘output side’. Have European Commission Presidents wielded their power differently depending on whether they assumed office as lead candidates of a transnational European party or not? This chapter seeks to address this gap by examining the track record of Commission Presidents after their elections. The assessment is performed along three dimensions of EU politics: executive-legislative relations, party politics and the institutional balance in the EU. Specifically, three presidential terms are being compared to isolate the effects of the Spitzenkandidaten process: the second term of José Manuel Barroso, the single term of Jean-Claude Juncker and the first term of Ursula von der Leyen. Empirically, the chapter triangulates different methods of data collection and analysis, both qualitative—such as documentary research, process-tracing and interviews—and quantitative—such as voting behaviour in the EP and the textual analysis of official documents. Based on the available evidence, the chapter concludes that a Spitzenkandidat at the helm of the Commission has changed some limited aspects of the decision-making process, creating greater opportunities to cooperation among the supranational institutions, but has not transformed the consensual style of EU decision-making.
Trilogues have become 'normal' structures in European Union (EU) decision-making but their functioning, based on secluded decision-making, makes it difficult to understand how institutional positions are formed and managed and which actors are better positioned to influence policy outputs. These are, however, important questions because, first, a coherent position in trilogues (one that withstands the scrutiny of the Council) enhances the European Parliament's (EP) chances of achieving a favourable outcome following negotiation; second, because it has become more complicated to find a common position within the EP due to increased levels of politicisation and polarisation (especially in the form of Euroscepticism) in EU policy-making. Therefore, this article focuses on preparatory bodies preceding trilogues and the role they play in building Parliament's positions. With the shift of political conflict from plenary to committees and now to shadows meetings, the latter have become de facto decision-making bodies. Not only do they serve to mediate intra-institutional conflict but also to anticipate Council and Commission positions. This article compares the use of shadows meetings in politicised and non-politicised issues. With the use of ethnographic data provided by participant observation and elite interviews, we aim to provide explanations on how these new instruments serve to informally manage politicisation, focusing in particular on the advantages of insularity in highly publicised negotiations.
Proportional data, in which response variables are expressed as percentages or fractions of a whole, are analysed in many subfields of ecology and evolution. The scale‐independence of proportions makes them appropriate to analyse many biological phenomena, but statistical analyses are not straightforward, since proportions can only take values from zero to one and their variance is usually not constant across the range of the predictor. Transformations to overcome these problems are often applied, but can lead to biased estimates and difficulties in interpretation.
In this paper, we provide an overview of the different types of proportional data and discuss the different analysis strategies available. In particular, we review and discuss the use of promising, but little used, techniques for analysing continuous (also called non‐count‐based or non‐binomial) proportions (e.g. percent cover, fraction time spent on an activity): beta and Dirichlet regression, and some of their most important extensions.
A major distinction can be made between proportions arising from counts and those arising from continuous measurements. For proportions consisting of two categories, count‐based data are best analysed using well‐developed techniques such as logistic regression, while continuous proportions can be analysed with beta regression models. In the case of >2 categories, multinomial logistic regression or Dirichlet regression can be applied. Both beta and Dirichlet regression techniques model proportions at their original scale, which makes statistical inference more straightforward and produce less biased estimates relative to transformation‐based solutions. Extensions to beta regression, such as models for variable dispersion, zero‐one augmented data and mixed effects designs have been developed and are reviewed and applied to case studies. Finally, we briefly discuss some issues regarding model fitting, inference, and reporting that are particularly relevant to beta and Dirichlet regression.
Beta regression and Dirichlet regression overcome some problems inherent in applying classic statistical approaches to proportional data. To facilitate the adoption of these techniques by practitioners in ecology and evolution, we present detailed, annotated demonstration scripts covering all variations of beta and Dirichlet regression discussed in the article, implemented in the freely available language for statistical computing, r .
The extent to which the European Commission exercises ‘political’ roles in European integration is very much up for debate. Some recent analyses of the Commission take it for granted that its political roles have been in decline, while others have suggested they have increased – especially under the current President of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who was appointed in 2014 by a much more politicised process than had been used previously and whose College has sought to present itself as being guided by a political mission and as offering political leadership to the EU. In this article, we aim to show that in the debate about the political roles of the Commission, ‘political’ has often been poorly defined and operationalised. By drawing on Public Administration scholarship, we offer a framework for analysing how and where in the EU system the Commission’s political roles might become manifest. We then assess empirically these roles in different functions the Commission undertakes.
The ability to amend legislative proposals introduced by the Commission is central to legislative process in the European Union. Despite this, very few attempts have been made to capture and explain such amendments. This study addresses this gap in the literature by considering the changes between the Commission’s proposals and the final legislative outcome passed by the European Union. It does so by implementing minimum edit distance algorithms to measure changes between legislative proposals and outcomes. The findings suggest that legislative amendments are determined by the formal and informal institutional structures in which negotiations take place and characteristics of the proposal itself. Our conclusions contribute to the ongoing debate on the nature and distribution of legislative powers in the European Union.
Despite the ubiquity of textual data, so far, few researchers have applied text mining to answer organizational research questions. Text mining, which essentially entails a quantitative approach to the analysis of (usually) voluminous textual data, helps accelerate knowledge discovery by radically increasing the amount data that can be analyzed. This paper aims to acquaint organizational researchers with the fundamental logic underpinning text mining, the analytical stages involved, and contemporary techniques that may be used to achieve different types of objectives. The specific analytical techniques reviewed are: 1) dimensionality reduction, 2) distance and similarity computing, 3) clustering, 4) topic modelling, and 5) classification. We describe how text mining may extend contemporary organizational research by allowing the testing of existing or new research questions with data that are likely to be rich, contextualized, and ecologically valid. After an exploration of how evidence for the validity of text mining output may be generated, we conclude the manuscript by illustrating the text mining process in a job analysis setting using a dataset comprised of job vacancies.
This article explores if and how national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature on about the informational efficiency of elections, we are interested in how political uncertainty in the run up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision-making in the European Union (EU), we find that pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level, that this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes, and that it is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. Our findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research into the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations, and legislative bargaining in the EU.
Consultations with stakeholders are a policy instrument widely used by policy makers to design policies and prepare legislative proposals across national and supranational systems of government. The European Union has recently reviewed its stakeholder consultation regime and asked for stakeholders’ policy input. This offers an opportunity to examine empirically stakeholders’ own evaluation of the regime and to ask a fundamental question about its democratic credentials: Do stakeholders recognise the EU consultation regime as reinforcing bias in interest representation by benefiting policy insiders, or conversely as an instrument that alleviates bias in supranational policymaking? Building on rational choice institutionalism, this article outlines the potential distributional outcomes of the regime and argues that they are likely to vary along the lines of a classic divide in policy making that opposes policy insiders to outsiders. Two competing narratives are discussed in relation to the expected direction of this variation by focusing on insiders’ incentives to support or oppose the regime.The observable implications are tested empirically on an original dataset containing information about stakeholders’ positions on the evaluation of the regime status quo, its proposed further institutionalisation and their recommendations for change.The findings describe a consultation regime that seems to have created conditions alleviating bias in stakeholders’ participation in supranational policymaking.This is evident in the lack of systematic, significant differences between insiders and outsiders in the evaluation of the consultation regime.Where differences do occur, they are consistent with the image of a consultation regime that has not reinforced bias in favour of policy insiders.These actors are found to be more critical of the regime status quo, its institutionalisation and more inclined to recommend policy improvements.This supports an optimistic view over the democratic credentials and legitimacy of the EU consultation regime and outlines an additional scenario under which policy actors that are traditionally associated with exerting more power and influence find themselves stripped of their privileged position in the context of European supranational governance.
In the academic debate on the relative powers and influence of the EU institutions, it has become common to suggest - especially in the case of advocates of the 'new intergovernmentalism' - that the European Commission is in decline. In this article we show that while in some limited respects this is indeed the case, the Commission's overall position in the EU system is not one of having become a weaker institutional actor. The extent of the losses of its powers and influence tends to be exaggerated, while in some aspects its powers and influence have actually been strengthened. We show this by focusing on three of the Commission's core functions - agenda-setter, legislative actor and executive - all of which are widely portrayed as being in decline. We incorporate into our analysis both the formal and informal resources available to the Commission in exercising the functions.
Poland has been preparing to take over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union (CEU) for quite some time now, and will chair the Council in the second half of 2011 (July – December). This is a new challenge for Poland, requiring more effort on behalf of public administration, including local authorities, NGOs and voluntary workers.
The aim of this paper is to present the mechanisms involved in exercising the Presidency in the CEU following the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty; hence, the mechanism of shaping the priorities on the European agenda and the assumptions of the Polish Presidency, especially those pertaining to the economic problems of the EU.
Co-decisions between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament are
increasingly adopted as early agreements. Recent EU studies have pinpointed how
this informal turn in EU governance has altered the existing balance of power
between EU actors and within EU institutions. However, the implications of
accelerated EU decision-making are expected to have repercussions beyond the
EU system and in other institutions impinging on the role of national parliaments.
This study examines the implications of an alteration of EU political time on
national parliaments’ ability to scrutinize their executives in EU affairs. A mixed
method approach has been applied. This strategy combines survey data on
national parliaments’ scrutiny process and response to early agreements for 26 EU
countries with a case study examination of national parliaments in Denmark,
the UK and Germany. The burgeoning research agenda on EU timescapes is
applied. This study finds that the clocks of most national parliaments are out of
time with the EU decision-mode of early agreements, which severely hampers the
national parliaments’ ability to scrutinize national governments.
This paper seeks to evaluate and explain the degree of supranational entrepreneurship shown by the European Commission following the global financial crisis. Focusing on the period 2007–2011, it finds that the Commission used its right of initiative and/or mobilised ideas and information to pursue a supranational European Union (EU) economic policy in few cases. These findings are explained with reference to strategic entrepreneurship, that is the Commission’s reluctance to support integrationist initiatives unless they stand a chance of success, and by the fact that partisanship took precedence for the EU executive over the pursuit of integration in some cases. The Commission could yet capitalise on the crisis but its actions in this period call for greater attention by scholars to preference formation by supranational actors as well as a reconsideration of what it means for the EU executive to lead.
The codecision procedure was designed to change the distribution of power among the European Union (EU) institutions. In theory, the codecision procedure, at least the amended version introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty that came into effect in 1999, weakened the Commission and placed the Parliament on an equal footing with the Council. We assess how the codecision procedure works in practice using data on the preferences of legislative actors on a large number of proposals negotiated between 1999 and 2009. We also test theoretical propositions derived from Schelling regarding the effects of policy agreement within each chamber on the relative bargaining success of the Council and EP. Our findings suggest that, in comparison to the consultation procedure, codecision has strengthened the EP and weakened the Commission. However, the Council holds certain bargaining advantages over the EP, and as a result the EP has not achieved parity with the Council under codecision.
This article provides a detailed study of how bureaucratic politics in the European Commission can systematically affect the substance of the legislative agenda that makes up European integration. Based on an encompassing description of the bureaucratic policy-formulation process within the Commission, it shows how the Commission’s different elements play off against each other and thereby systematically advantage the lead department and the Secretariat-General. Empirical case studies from a sample of 48 policy formulation processes in the Commission during 1999–2008 illustrate how these structural advantages actually change the political substance of policy proposals. Against additional evidence on an uneven distribution of procedural advantages across the Commission departments, it concludes that bureaucratic politics in the Commission may account for systematic biases on the European Union’s legislative agenda.
This paper develops a typology of strategies used by political actors to place issues on the Europena Union (EU) agenda. In doing so, it builds on a theoretically derived twofold distinction between two challenges in putting issues on the agenda (gaining attention and building credibility) and two factors that actors can affect (venues and frames). The resulting four types of strategy are further specified on the basis of the existing case study literature on EU agenda-setting. This results in a typology that elucidates the political rationales behind agenda-setting strategies and applies to all types of actors in EU policy-making. The typology can be used to understand the interrelationships between different (types of) strategies, to identify opposing strategies meant to keep issues off the EU agenda, and to compare agenda-setting processes in the EU and domestic political systems.
Today we have three bodies of literature relevant for understanding negotiations in international organizations, and they seem like islands in the sea, largely independent from one another. Each island has established significant relevant knowledge, while not taking the others' ideas into account very much. The three are negotiation analysis, political economy and constructivist contributions. Each has potential value for scholars of the European Union (EU). This divided field, after accomplishing much, offers many interesting opportunities for fresh research. It faces the prominent challenges of addressing fundamental conceptual problems and integrating the separate literatures.
This article is a study of bicameral conflict resolution between the Council and the European Parliament in the European Union, which has established a bicameral conciliation process under the co-decision procedure. Scholars commonly agree that the European Parliament has gained power under the co-decision procedure, but the impact of the conciliation process on the power distribution between the Council and the European Parliament remains unclear. The scholarly debate suggests that the power of the institutional actors depends on their proximity to the status quo, the (im-)patience and the specific preference distribution of the institutional actors, although most analyses assume that the Commission plays an insignificant role. Using an ordered probit model, this study examines the power distribution between the two institutional actors, the factors for their bargaining success and the role of the Commission in the period between 1999 and 2002. The findings show that the European Parliament wins most conflicts, but that the Council is more successful in multi-dimensional disputes. The results confirm some theoretical claims made in the literature, such as the importance of the status quo location and of preference cohesiveness. However, they also reject a major assumption in the literature on the irrelevance of the Commission in the conciliation process, which we show to have an influential informational position for parliamentary success.
During the last decade text mining has become a widely used discipline utilizing statistical and machine learning methods. We present the tm package which provides a framework for text mining applications within R. We give a survey on text mining facilities in R and explain how typical application tasks can be carried out using our framework. We present techniques for count-based analysis methods, text clustering, text classification and string kernels.
Due to the large amounts of text generated by government agencies and policymakers, computer-assisted text-as-data methods are starting to become more popular for scholars of public administration, public policy, and political science, as they allow for much faster processing of large amounts of textual data. Here, I review several of the more common text-as-data methods and provide an overview of their applicability to different data structures and substantive questions in public administration. Then, using thousands of documents issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and its predecessor agency—the Health Care Financing Administration—I showcase the utility of topic models by illustrating how they can be used in conjunction with other politically relevant covariates to help explain changes in agency priorities. I then conclude by discussing other possible uses for computational text analysis methods in public administration.
Why do EU actors promote secluded fora of decision-making even as they have committed themselves to open and public lawmaking? How do they perceive and reconcile the ensuing tensions in practice? These questions, arising amidst growing public controversy, point to a blind spot in the scholarly agenda on EU lawmaking, which has overwhelmingly focused on the games institutions play. From an interpretivist perspective, it argues that rules are 'made' not by detached officials, but by practitioners puzzling out the meaning of their actions in their everyday experiences. Based on an extensive interview material, the article captures trilogues as 'politicized diplomacy' and shows how they have become a 'permeable institution', shaped by dense flows of exchange between 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. The article helps pinpoint to what extent and how trilogues challenge democratic norms; and it punctures the myth of trilogues as quiet politics dominated by producer interests.
An ever-increasing share of human interaction, communication, and culture is recorded as digital text. We provide an introduction to the use of text as an input to economic research. We discuss the features that make text different from other forms of data, offer a practical overview of relevant statistical methods, and survey a variety of applications. (JEL C38, C55, L82, Z13)
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 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.
While there are many studies that focus on the changing power of the European Parliament (EP), the shifting relationships between European Union (EU) institutions has received far less attention. Few consider the impact of the transformation of the EP on the other core EU institutions, particularly the Commission and Council. Together these three institutions determine the policy outcomes of the EU, but how they work together and the changing balance of power between them is largely a mystery. This research seeks to fill this lacuna by examining the relative policy influence of these institutions through the lens of policy preference congruence and inter-institutional policy coalitions. Utilizing the DEU II dataset to measure institutional policy preferences and policy outcomes it is possible to discern patterns of policy preference congruence between these institutions and assess their relative influence over policy outcomes. This research finds that previous expectations of a stable policy coalition between the two “supranational” actors are no longer accurate. Increasingly the EP and the Council share policy congruence and form effective policy coalitions. Moreover, the historical dependence of the EP on the support of the Commission has diminished, while the Council continues to exert largely independent policy influence
Who controls the information that is part of the EU legislative processes and is the process as a whole under control? This article explores the legal framework and the applicability of that framework to evolving informal practices by the three key institutions (EP, Council, Commission) involved in the EU legislative process. Given the legislative deadlock on an updated transparency regulation, there are challenges relating to the opacity of Council and Member State positions, legal advice and the so-called four-column documents, which are used to map out progress in interinstitutional negotiations. Currently, the institutions themselves keep control and adopt the relevant rules as a matter of internal (or interinstitutional) working arrangements. We argue that when the institutions exercise legislative functions they are in fact exercising highly political functions that define the fundamental policy choices of the Union’s action. This requires not only passive transparency in the form of access to documents but also proactive transparency by the institutions themselves.
Setting the political agenda is a critical and usually powerful aspect of policy making. However, the ability to set the agenda, without any significant decision-making powers, can undermine this influence, leaving a technical agenda setter without substantive political influence. This research examines the difference between technical and political agenda setting through an analysis of the policy impact of the Commission of the European Union (EU). Using two newly developed databases on Commission policy priorities and all adopted EU legislation, as well as the Decision Making in the European Union (DEU II) dataset, we investigate the ability of the Commission to shape EU legislative outcomes to reflect its policy preferences between 2000 and 2011. Our analyses highlight the comparative weakness of the Commission?s policy influence, despite its formal monopoly of legislative initiation. In this way, we argue for a need to carefully differentiate between technical and political agenda setters when evaluating the policy influence of different political actors.
This paper looks at the use of recitals in the int
erpretation of EU
legislation, and mechanisms for connecting them to
normative provisions. The
purposive approach to the interpretation of EU legi
slation taken by the European
Court of Justice makes frequent references to recit
als as helping to establish the
purpose of normative provisions. Our research uses
a cosine similarity based
approach to link articles with relevant provisions
to help legal professionals and
lay end-users interpret the law. Such support can
be used in legal knowledge-
based systems.
Politics and political conflict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive
costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have hindered their use in political science research. Here
lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We
provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many instances, the methods have already obtained part
of their promise. But there are pitfalls to using automated methods—they are no substitute for careful thought and close reading
and require extensive and problem-specific validation. We survey a wide range of new methods, provide guidance on how to validate
the output of the models, and clarify misconceptions and errors in the literature. To conclude, we argue that for automated
text methods to become a standard tool for political scientists, methodologists must contribute new methods and new methods
of validation.
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.
Contemporary linguistic and rhetorical analysis of legislative writing reveals various kinds of indeterminacy, much of it either accidental or unavoidable, but some designed to politically influence subsequent court interpretation. Analysis to date, however, has concentrated on final texts, preventing discovery of rhetorical strategies only evident from an analysis of the text's evolution. Focusing on a contentious attempt in the New Zealand Parliament between 2005 and 2007 to repeal a section in the 1961 Crimes Act that provided parents or guardians with a defense for using excessive physical force on their children, this article reports on an investigation into whether analysis of successive stages of the formal legislative process, including the oral debates in the House of Representatives, might reveal textual traces of non-ambiguous language use designed less to clarify the law than to secure the assent of opposing parties. As well as confirming reliance of the legislative text on indeterminacy, what of particular interest showed up was a significant use of redundancy: a feature which could appear on the surface to be nothing more than a mechanism for achieving precision the holy grail of legal discourse but which in this instance performs additional rhetorical work.
We examine how an executive's consultations with interest groups during the formative stage of the policy process affect its bargaining success during the decision-making stage after it has proposed new policies to legislative actors. Our theory sets out how consultations with interest groups strengthen the executive by bolstering its formal and informal agenda-setting power. The empirical testing ground for our theory is the European Union (EU), and in particular the consultations held by the European Commission. The analysis assesses the effects of these consultations on the congruence between the Commission's legislative proposals on controversial issues and EU laws. Our analysis incorporates detailed information on the type and scope of each consultation. In line with our theory, we find that the Commission had more success during the decision-making stage after conducting open consultations with large numbers of interest groups during the policy formation stage.
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.
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.
The development of negotiation theory over recent decades has been organized around two major paradigms: bargaining and problem solving. For the bargaining paradigm, indicators of flexibility include concession rates, initiation of new proposals, and other soft behaviors. For the problem-solving perspective, flexibility is usually indicated by a search for better, mutually beneficial solutions to problems that satisfy the needs, identities, and interests of all parties. Empirical research generally reveals that bargaining behaviors are used more frequently in international negotiations than is problem solving. This may be explained by the dominance of the realist paradigm of international relations, within which most diplomats are socialized. Since diplomats generally construct their image of negotiations in terms of bargaining, it is hardly surprising that these behaviors should be prevalent in actual negotiations. In addition, empirical research methods utilized to study negotiations tend to emphasize bargaining variables, and more subtle problem-solving behaviors are more difficult to detect. The empirical prevalence of bargaining, however, does not imply that it is the best method to induce flexibility in international negotiations. On the contrary, most research tends to reveal that problem solving produces greater flexibility and more frequent, efficient, equitable, and durable agreements than bargaining does.
Thinking of the European Union's (EU's) Council system in terms of institutional environments can help generalize the scope conditions under which co-operative styles of negotiation develop and become durable over time. Analytically, we expect to find that those institutional environments which code higher on a set of four independent variables should exhibit more robust patterns of co-operative negotiation; that is, are highly insulated from domestic audiences, transact with wide scope, high interaction intensity, and/or maintain a high density of norms and group standards. This in turn offers a concrete application of the sociological argument that EU institutions not only matter, but shows how, by building legitimation and appropriateness standards into the negotiation process, institutional environments can place limits on instrumentalism.
EU negotiations are characterized bythe coexistence of a bargaining and a problem-solving approach. The permanence of EU negotiations discourages tough bargaining behaviour, as does the prevalence of strong consensus norms. On the other hand, evidence exists of very confrontational behaviour that often leads to lowest common denominator solutions. We argue that the mode of negotiation to be found in the EU decision-making processes is contextually determined. Empirically it is demonstrated that day-to-day negotiations in the EU are to a large extent problem-solving exercises. Under certain circumstances, however, conflictual bargaining occurs. The pattern varies with, therefore, level of politicization and type of policy, and according to the stage in the decision-making process. We also suggest that processes of learning have resulted in changes in the EU's negotiation style: problem-solving has become increasingly institutionalized within the EU machinery.
The codecision procedure has grown in importance and scope since its inception in 1992. At first characterized by inter-institutional mistrust, the codecision procedure today is used to settle quick political agreements informally between the Parliament and the Council. This new negotiation culture means closer cooperation between the Parliament and the Council, but presents serious challenges for the Commission.This paper argues that the Commission’s problems are due to its internal organization being split in two – there is: a highly political ‘top’ level including the Commissioners, their cabinets and the Secretariat General, and a less political ‘bottom’ level with more technically-minded civil servants. The Commission therefore needs to think and act more politically to avoid being marginalized within the codecision procedure.
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.
In this innovative account of the way policy issues rise and fall on the national agendaâthe first detailed study of so many issues over an extended periodâFrank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones show that rapid change not only can but does happen in the hidebound institutions of government. Short-term, single-issue analyses of public policy, the authors contend, give a narrow and distorted view of public policy as the result of a cozy arrangement between politicians, interest groups, and the media. Baumgartner and Jones upset these notions by focusing on several issuesâincluding civilian nuclear power, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safetyâover a much longer period of time to reveal patterns of stability alternating with bursts of rapid, unpredictable change. A welcome corrective to conventional political wisdom, Agendas and Instability revises our understanding of the dynamics of agenda-setting and clarifies a subject at the very center of the study of American politics.
18 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released July 2009. This article reviews theoretically-grounded empirical studies on committees in the European Union, by focusing on research published from the late 1990s onwards. The aim is to report on the state of the art and to shed light on emerging puzzles, research gaps and promising venues for further research. We examine research questions, theoretical approaches, design, and the main empirical findings. The conclusions provide our critical remarks and suggestions for future research. Research for this article was funded by a grant from the INTUNE project (Integrated and United? A quest for Citizenship in an ever closer Europe) financed by the Sixth Framework Program of the European Union, Priority 7, Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge Based Society (CIT3-CT-2005-513421).
We develop attractive functional forms and simple quasi-likelihood estimation methods for regression models with a fractional dependent variable. Compared with log-odds type procedures, there is no difficulty in recovering the regression function for the fractional variable, and there is no need to use ad hoc transformations to handle data at the extreme values of zero and one. We also offer some new, robust specification tests by nesting the logit or probit function in a more general functional form. We apply these methods to a data set of employee participation rates in 401(k) pension plans. Copyright 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Text as Data: An Overview
- K Benoit
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Staying in the Loop: The Commission's Role in First Reading Agreements
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Mapping Recitals to Normative Provisions in EU Legislation to Assist Legal Interpretation
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Investigation of Informal Trilogue Negotiations since the Lisbon Treaty - Added Value, Lack of Transparency and Possible Democratic Deficit
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