Edoardo Bressanelli

The Informal Politics of Legislation: Explaining Secluded Decision Making in the European Union

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.

The Shadow of the European Council. Understanding Legislation on Economic Governance

Abstract This article analyses the role of the European Council in two key legislative packages on economic and budgetary coordination, the Six-pack and the Two-pack, which were negotiated under the ordinary legislative procedure. It assesses how and to what extent the key actor in the literature on the new intergovernmentalism – the European Council – is able to curb the powers of the supranational institutions – the Commission and the European Parliament – in a policy area where the community method has been applied since the Treaty of Lisbon. It tracks the development of the legislative negotiations – from the stages preceding the Commission’s proposal to their conclusions, relying on official documents, press reports and 30 original interviews with key decision-makers. The strong role of the European Council both as an agenda-setter and in the legislative negotiations stands out, and suggests that the implications of new intergovernmentalism may well extend beyond intergovernmental decision-making processes.

The impact of informalisation: Early agreements and voting cohesion in the European Parliament

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 etu2002al.’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.

Europarties after enlargement : organization, ideology and competition

Introduction PART I: CONTEXT AND THEORY 1. EU Democracy and Europarty Institutionalization 2. Framing the Impact of Enlargement PART II: EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS 3. Widening and Deepening the Political Groups 4. Europarty Ideology: Data and Measurement 5. Ideological Cohesion and Differences after Enlargement 6. Ideology and Pragmatism in the West and the East 7. From Preferences to Behaviour: Voting Cohesion in the EP 8. Left-Right Confrontation or Grand Coalition? Conclusions: Europarties Prospects beyond the 2014 EP Elections

The European Parliament and economic governance: explaining a case of limited influence

ABSTRACT This article studies the influence of the European Parliament (EP) in the reform of the EU’s economic governance. Descriptively, it aims to provide a systematic map of the negotiations of the Six- and the Two-Pack legislation, focusing on the key controversies between the co-legislators, and comparing the position of the EP with the Commission’s legislative proposals, the Council position and the final legislative output. The surprisingly limited influence of the EP – given its formal powers and the assessment made by most scholars – is then assessed through rational choice and sociological institutionalist perspectives. While the more favourable BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) of the Council could explain the outcome of the Two-Pack, and a norm of responsibility triggered by the crisis could account for the limited impact of the EP on the Six-Pack, the authors advance a different explanation. They suggest that in policy areas close to ‘core state powers’, such as budgetary surveillance, the member states still have a primary role to play. Despite the extension of codecision, the EP is expected to act within the boundaries that member states define. The authors’ policy-based explanation adds a new perspective on the study of the EP’s influence on EU law-making.

When politics prevails: Parties, elections and loyalty in the European Parliament

In many political systems, legislators serve multiple principals who compete for their loyalty in legislative votes. This article explores the political conditions under which legislators choose between their competing principals in multilevel systems, with a focus on how election proximity shapes legislative behaviour across democratic arenas. Empirically, the effect of electoral cycles on national party delegations’ ‘collective disloyalty’ with their political groups in the European Parliament (EP) is analysed. It is argued that election proximity changes the time horizons, political incentives and risk perceptions of both delegations and their principals, ‘punctuating’ cost-benefit calculations around defection as well as around controlling, sanctioning and accommodating. Under the shadow of elections, national delegations’ collective disloyalty with their transnational groups should, therefore, increase. Using a new dataset with roll-call votes cast under legislative codecision by delegations between July 1999 and July 2014, the article shows that the proximity of planned national and European elections drives up disloyalty in the EP, particularly by delegations from member states with party-centred electoral rules. The results also support a ‘politicisation’ effect: overall, delegations become more loyal over time, but the impact of election proximity as a driver of disloyalty is strongest in the latest parliament analysed (i.e., 2009–2014). Furthermore, disloyalty is more likely in votes on contested and salient legislation, and under conditions of Euroscepticism; by contrast, disloyalty is less likely in votes on codification files, when a delegation holds the rapporteurship and when the national party participates in government. The analysis sheds new light on electoral politics as a determinant of legislative choice under competing principals, and on the conditions under which politics ‘travels’ across democratic arenas in the European Unions multilevel polity.

The Informal Politics of Codecision: Introducing a New Data Set on Early Agreements in the European Union

One of the most important developments in the history of the EU’s codecision procedure has been the steep rise in “early agreements�? since 1999, and the shift of legislative decision-making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas. As part of a wider research project on “The Informal Politics of Codecision�?, this working paper launches a new data set on all 797 legislative files concluded under codecision between 1999 and 2009. The paper discusses the process of data collection and coding; explains and justifies the operationalisation and measurement of key variables; and elaborates on the methodological challenges of capturing informal political processes. The paper offers rich descriptive statistics on the scale and scope of early agreements across time, and explores how key characteristics of the legislative file (legal nature, policy area, complexity, salience, policy type, duration) and of the main negotiators (priorities of the Council Presidency, ideological distance between Parliament’s rapporteur and national minister, Presidency’s workload) co-vary with decision-makers’ choice to “go informal�?. Demonstrating that early agreements are not restricted to technical, urgent or uncontested files but occur across the breadth of EU legislation, and increasingly so with time in use, the data strongly underline the relevance of informal decision-making for scholars and policy-makers alike.

The Presidentialization of American Political Parties

This chapter focuses on party presidentialization in the presidential system par excellence: following Samuels and Shugart (2010), the United States (US) parties should clearly, and obviously, represent the prototypical case of presidentialized parties. However, in a separation of powers system, parties are fragmented into different arenas, horizontally (between the executive and the legislature) as well as vertically (between the federal, the state, and the county or municipal level). This means that one needs to search for evidence of “presidentialization” both in different arenas of partisan activity, each one with its own functioning logic, as well as in the broader political system, where the institutions of government, and their parties, come together.

Fit or Misfit?: Italian Parties in Europe

We depart from the argument that policy congruence between the national and the EU parties has a role in bridging the democratic deficit of the EU. We assess it for the difficult case of Italy, where the issue of parties transnational affiliation is incredibly divisive, and the party system is in a state of flux. Using the EU Profiler data, we are able to show that its parties are remarkably congruent. Yet, we suggest that congruence might overestimate the parties representative capacity.

EU Democracy and Europarty Institutionalization

This first chapter critically reflects on the development of the Europarties, by asking: which analytical dimensions need to be considered to fully understand, and then empirically capture, their consolidation? Under what conditions is the strengthening of the Europarties and the EU party system conducive to democracy? In order to properly address these questions, this chapter presents an argument for the use of the concept of party institutionalization. In particular, it elaborates on this concept as it has been defined in the context of the developing polities and, distinctively, by Randall and Svasand (1999, 2002), making it ‘travel’ to the Europarties.