Fabio Franchino

The Commission's Executive Discretion, Information and Comitology

This article examines the determinants of the European Commissions executive discretion and the impact of comitology when policy authority is delegated by member states and the Parliament (i.e. principals) and all actors are uninformed about future contingencies. In such context, the Commission always prefers complete discretion while principals have to trade off the risk of agency losses against the need to give enough latitude to the Commission to deal with unexpected events. The analysis reveals a general trade-off in the institutional design of the European Union. On the one hand, the Commission can enjoy high and stable discretion, differing across legislative procedures, degree of uncertainty and of preference convergence, because of its monopoly proposal power. On the other hand, comitology procedures impose burdensome constraints on the Commissions autonomy and can be explained as a price for legislative intervention paid by the Commission. Finally, comitology procedures also increase the conflict across principals over the degree of discretion to grant to the Commission because the trade-off between ex ante discretion and ex post control can disappear with multiple principals.

Legislative Involvement in Parliamentary Systems: Opportunities, Conflict, and Institutional Constraints

In parliamentary systems, the need to preserve the political agreement that sustains the executive often motivates legislative involvement in policymaking. Institutional arrangements regulating executive–legislative relations and ministerial autonomy also structure parliamentary participation. However, empirical evidence of these effects remains limited to a few policies and countries. European Union legislation provides the opportunity to test expectations about legislative involvement for different types of measure across various institutional arrangements, across multiple policy areas, and across time. In this article, we investigate legislative involvement in the transposition of 724 directives in 15 member states from 1978 to 2004. Our results confirm that involvement increases as conflict between the responsible minister and her coalition partners intensifies. The discretionary scope embedded in the directive further inflates this effect. Additionally, parliamentary involvement decreases as the governments institutional advantage over the legislature increases, especially if intracoalitional conflict deepens.

Analysing political change in Italy

After more than forty years of inertia, Italy has produced intense dynamism and political change. The literature has been bifurcated in the emphasis on domestic and European factors explaining such an extraordinary transformation. This special issue collects works that use approaches and methods of comparative politics and policy analysis to disentangle the relative importance of European and domestic factors shaping electoral competition, legislative voting behaviour, administrative reform of local authorities, lobbying, the nature of Italian capitalism, and reform of regional, pension and monetary policies. Although any generalization on the Europeanization of the Italian political system is unwarranted, a meso-level non-teleological approach has good leverage in the analysis of political change in Italy.

The role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU directives

Studies on the role of regions in the EU policy process concentrate mainly on policy formulation and implementation of regional funds. In this article, we redress this bias by investigating the formal role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU regulatory policies, specifically in the transposition of directives. Subnational authorities play a secondary, but increasingly important, role in the application of these measures. Their impact is greater on environmental and social policies, as it is also on public contract legislation. More decentralized states display higher levels of subnational involvement but, in these states, regional participation in national policy-making and a high number of regional authorities decrease the likelihood of finding subnational measures of transposition. There is also more subnational involvement in states with territories that have both an elected government as well as special arrangements regulating their relations with the EU. Finally, subnational involvement tends to prolong the process of transposition.

Delegation and constraints in the national execution of the EC policies: A longitudinal and qualitative analysis

When it adopts an EC law, the Council of Ministers, the main legislative body of the Community, decides on the extent to which implementing measures are taken by national administrations and the latitude of national executive action. This article reviews, across a data set of 158 major EC laws, the pattern of delegation of executive powers to national authorities and the statutory constraints employed by the Council to delimit the national execution of European policies. The study provides, first, a comparative assessment of the choices taken by Community legislators on issues of delegation and suggests an explanation to the relative stringency of European law. It then evaluates the long‐term trend towards more concise legislation and greater executive discretion of member states, but not necessarily of more legislative output, that emerges from the analysis of the data set. Finally, it explains how factors such as credibility of commitment, information asymmetries and the need for flexible, but controlled and credible, transition to European policies account for the use of 12 categories of constraints that the Council imposes on national administrations.

Efficiency or credibility? Testing the two logics of delegation to the European Commission

This article critically elaborates Majones argument that there are two logics underlying the delegation of powers to the European Commission: the logic of efficiency and the logic of credibility. It analyses 601 provisions of secondary legislation and suggests a method to distinguish the two rationales. It then correlates executive powers with statutory constraints. A surprising result is that these constraints are more associated, in general, with credibility-based than with efficiency-based delegation; however, statutory constraints that facilitate control by national state actors are more likely to be associated with efficiency-based delegation. The article concludes by emphasizing that different strategies of control are related to different underlying motivations to delegate.

Complying with the Transposition Deadlines of EU Directives: Evidence from Italy

This article assesses the causes of the timing of transposition of 2179 EU directives, using an original dataset of 3183 laws adopted by the Italian authorities. Amendments to Commission directives are transposed sooner. Additionally, EU laws with longer time for adaptation present a lower risk of delay beyond the deadline. More intense supranational monitoring speeds up transposition and lowers the risk of delay. Interestingly, as the volume of EU laws to be incorporated increases, transposition “accelerates” and, since 1984, delay is less likely to occur. As expected, administrative and legal reforms undertaken at the national level have lowered the risk of delay and increased the likelihood of transposition. Finally, those legal instruments that offer the opportunity to potential veto players to voice their concerns and delay transposition do not appear to corroborate entirely our predictions. As expected, legislative and local authority measures increase the risk of delay, while ministerial acts both lower this risk and expedite transposition. But, contrary to our predictions, legislative and cabinet acts accelerate transposition and cabinet measures increase rather than reduce the likelihood of delay.

The Study of EU Public Policy : Results of a Survey

This note reports the results of a survey of all the articles on EU policies published since 1994 in three major journals. It makes four recommendations. We should probably invest more research time on (1) established policy areas that are at the core of the Union, (2) the study of policy adjudication and the role of courts in the EU policy process, (3) confirmatory theory-testing research and (4) strategies that increase the number of observations, in order to make more use of statistical estimation techniques.

The social bases of nuclear energy policies in Europe: Ideology, proximity, belief updating and attitudes to risk

This article analyses the social bases underpinning the widely different trajectories of nuclear energy policies across Western European countries. Employing a set of surveys carried out in the last thirty years, it examines the conditional effects of ideology and geographical proximity to a nuclear power plant on attitudes toward nuclear energy, as well as the long- and short-term dynamics of belief updating after the occurrence of major accidents. Results highlight how proximity can strengthen, weaken or have no effect on the ideological component of these attitudes. Moreover, the publics of most countries with experience in nuclear energy display the traits of Bayesian dynamics of belief updating, especially in the vicinity of a plant. The article also shows the fairly exceptional traits of French public opinion. In conclusion, the broad social constraints within which governments operate, across time and space, shed light on the different policy trajectories of European countries.

Explaining negotiations in the conciliation committee

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.