Giacomo Benedetto

Rapporteurs as legislative entrepreneurs: the dynamics of the codecision procedure in Europe's parliament

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.

The Comparative Politics of Communist Euroscepticism in France, Italy and Spain

In this work, we compare the Euroscepticism of three West European parties from the same party family: the Communists. We address the questions of how the parties of France, Italy and Spain have adapted to the process of European integration and also the factors that have affected their different responses over time. The French and Italian parties have moved away from Euroscepticism to softer or even pro-integration approaches, whereas the Spanish Communists (PCE) have never been Eurosceptic. Party response to Europe is affected by international, national and party-specific factors, which have different degrees of explanatory power. During the early decades of European integration, international factors, first and foremost the relationship with Moscow, contributed to the Euroscepticism of Western Communists. Nevertheless, as with other party families and types, the Communists have responded to vote- and coalition-seeking opportunities.

The EU budget after Lisbon: rigidity and reduced spending?

This article examines the changes of the Lisbon Treaty to the rules on agreeing the European Unions (EU) annual budget and multiannual financial framework. The comparative budgets literature as well as theories of agenda-setting, veto players and empowerment of the European Parliament inform the analysis of how the EUs budgetary powers changed and the likely outcomes on spending. Overall, the powers of the European Parliament are reduced, the budget becomes more inflexible and, most significantly, the rules of the Lisbon Treaty have the effect of reducing the amounts available to spend. Although the Lisbon Treaty grants the European Parliament greater influence over ordinary EU legislation, national governments seem to have used the same treaty to send the Parliaments budgetary powers in the opposite direction and to curtail EU expenditure.

The EU Annual Budgetary Procedure: The Existing Rules and Proposed Reforms of the Convention and Intergovernmental Conference 2002-04

This article analyses the proposed reform of the annual budgetary procedure of the European Union (EU) during the 2002-04 Convention and Intergovernmental Conference (IGC). We offer two findings. First, the European Parliament already has the power to reduce agricultural and fisheries spending subject to support from a blocking minority in the Council. Hence, a reduction of the Unions spending on agriculture and other areas of compulsory expenditure is not dependent on a reform of the budgetary procedure. Second, the proposal from the Convention would have increased EP budgetary powers while the procedure adopted by the IGC strengthens the hand of the Council, removing Parliaments right to overrule it. In constitutional bargaining, we see that Parliament gains in a deliberative forum where unanimity is not required, while it loses in a closed IGC. Copyright (c) 2007 The Author(s); Journal compilation (c) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Power, money and reversion points: the European Union’s annual budgets since 2010

ABSTRACT At the close of 2010, an immediate effect of the rule changes to the European Union’s budgetary powers brought in by the Lisbon Treaty was a non-agreement of the annual budget for 2011, which was repeated for the budgets of 2013 and 2015. Interviews and documents show that the European Parliament lost and the Council won in determining spending outcomes for 2011 and immediate payments for the subsequent years; whether this also resulted in lower budgets overall is ambiguous. When spending increased, this was in line with the will of the Council. The most significant variable was the change in the rules, which shifted the location of the default budget or reversion point to Council’s advantage if there were no agreement.

Conclusion: Budget Policy, Past Experience and the Future

Much political capital has gone into the principle of budget reform in the past and in the present, but this has often floundered not on account of support for continuity but on account of division between the governments of EU member states. At the time of writing, the countries of the EU face the most serious economic crisis since the 1930s and yet the EU’s budget in terms of payments is fixed at no more than 1 per cent of collective national wealth. One solution that seems politically impossible would be for a massive federaltype expansion of the budget in order to provide compensation for economic shocks. Only in part, this may be possible via the semiformal mechanisms explored by Charles Blankart and Gerrit Koester in Chapter 5 although this could occur only outside the principal architecture of the EU system. Indeed, Ackrill and Kay (2006) provide an interesting account of how reform of the EU budget has occurred not through changing existing policies or procedures but by adding yet another layer of institutions on top of all the old ones. On the other hand, partial solutions confined to that 1 per cent of payments could involve investment in new policies at the expense of pre-existing policies, which has happened in the past.