Frank M. Häge

Committee Decision-making in the Council of the European Union

Committees of national officials play a major role in the decision-making of the European Unions main legislative body, the Council of Ministers. The study investigates the conditions under which bureaucrats decide on legislative dossiers without direct involvement of ministers. A statistical analysis is performed to examine this question, using an original data set of 439 legislative proposals. The results of the analysis indicate that formal institutional features such as the voting rule in the Council and the involvement of the European Parliament affect committee decision-making, whereas no effects of committee socialization and preference divergence among member states are identified. The results diminish concerns about the democratic legitimacy of Council decision-making to some extent, as the findings demonstrate that bureaucrats tend to decide only the less salient and more complex proposals.

Europeanization and the retreat of the state

Is the state on the retreat? We examine this question through an analysis of changing patterns of government involvement in infrastructure provision, which is generally considered to be one of the main functions of the modern state. Based on an analysis of the extent of privatization of infrastructure companies between 1970 and 2000 across 20 OECD countries, we find that there is indeed a general trend towards less public infrastructure provision visible in all of the countries and that the main factors associated with the extent of privatizations are EU membership and government ideology. Overall, the results of the study are consistent with the view that the trend of privatizing infrastructure companies was triggered by a change of the prominent economic discourse in the 1970s and that a rightist party ideology and EU membership fostered the adoption and implementation of these ideas in domestic settings.

Who Decides in the Council of the European Union

This study presents reliable cross-sectoral data on the relative involvement of working parties, senior committees and ministers in legislative decision-making of the Council of the European Union. In general, the results challenge the received wisdom that ministers are hardly involved in legislative decision-making. However, the findings also indicate that the involvement of different Council levels varies considerably across policy sectors. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the debate about the democratic legitimacy of Council decision-making.

Reconsidering the European Parliament’s Legislative Influence: Formal vs. Informal Procedures

Abstract 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.

The European Union Policy-Making dataset

This article introduces the European Union Policy - Making (EUPOL) dataset. The dataset contains the complete records of the European Commission’s PreLex database, which tracks the interactions between the European institutions on legislative proposals and non-legislative policy documents over time. To be of maximum use to the research community, the dataset is both comprehensive and replicable. It relies on 2600 variables to describe the detailed event histories of more than 29,000 inter-institutional decision-making processes between 1975 and 2009. The data collection has been completely automated, enabling scholars to scrutinize and replicate the generation of the dataset. To illustrate the dataset’s general utility and discuss specific pitfalls, I present a descriptive analysis of the outcome and duration of Council decision-making.

The effect of codecision on Council decision-making: informalization, politicization and power

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 Councils 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.

Politicising Council Decision-making: The Effect of European Parliament Empowerment

Research on the intra-institutional consequences of differences in the EUs inter-institutional rule configurations is rare. This study investigates the effect of the empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) on the active involvement of ministers in Council decision-making. The empowerment of the EP is likely to increase the incentives for bureaucrats in the Councils preparatory bodies to refer decisions on legislative dossiers to ministers. The empirical analysis examines this claim with data on about 6,000 legislative decision-making processes that were concluded between 1980 and the end of 2007. The analysis demonstrates a strong and robust association between the type of legislative procedure and different decision-making levels in the Council: a more powerful EP makes Council decision-making more politicised.

Coalition Building and Consensus in the Council of the European Union

Although qualified-majority voting is possible, member states in the Council of the European Union (EU) still adopt most policies by consensus. The agent-based model of coalition building in multilateral negotiations presented here addresses this puzzle. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions may emerge as an unintended by-product of government representatives’ desire to form blocking coalitions. A qualitative case study demonstrates the plausibility of the models assumptions and resulting coalition-building dynamics. Moreover, a quantitative test shows that the models predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. Finally, computational experiments predict a positive effect of the voting threshold but no effect of increases in membership on winning coalition size, which has important practical implications for institutional design and enlargement policy.

The Division of Labour in Legislative Decision-Making of the Council of the European Union

Little systematic empirical research exists about legislative decision-making in the Council of the European Union. This study contributes to closing this gap in the literature by examining which groups of actors within the Council decide on what type of issues. The Council structure is made up of a hierarchy consisting of working parties at the bottom, committees of senior officials in the middle and the ministers at the top. Based on a novel data set of legislative decisions made by the Council, the study examines the relative importance of these different Council levels. Two important findings emerge from the analysis: first, ministers are more involved in legislative decision-making than often assumed in the literature; second, the involvement of higher Council levels increases with features of dossiers that are related to political conflict. Although the results reduces worries about a lack of political accountability of Council decision-making, they cannot dispel these concerns completely.

The scheduling power of the EU Council Presidency

ABSTRACT Does the Presidency of the Council of the European Union have the ability to direct the political attention of this body by emphasizing and de-emphasizing policy issues according to its own priorities? This study examines this question empirically by relying on a new dataset on the monthly meeting duration of Council working parties in different policy areas between 1995 and 2014. The results of variance component analyses show that a considerable part of the over-time variation in the relative amount of political attention devoted to a policy area is systematically related to different Presidency periods. While not negating the constraints imposed on the Presidency by inherited agendas, programming and co-ordination requirements with other actors, the findings are consistent with the view that the Presidency has substantial scope for agenda-setting by determining what issues are being discussed, when they are being discussed and how much time is devoted for their discussion.