Thomas Winzen

European integration and national parliamentary oversight institutions

This article analyses to what extent and why national parliaments have created oversight institutions to adapt to European integration. Employing data from 22 member states from 1984–2006, the analysis suggests that government-supporting parliamentary groups create oversight institutions to enhance policy participation as integration becomes more important. Moreover, parliamentarians improve their access to information about government policy if governing parties are internally divided over European integration. Finally, oversight institutions that constrain the government’s discretion to act in European Union affairs exist in Eurosceptic countries, where they help parliamentarians to enhance electoral security.

Instrumental and Constitutional Differentiation in the European Union

Differentiation has become a salient feature of European integration. Yet systematic empirical evidence is lacking about its origins, duration and variation across countries and policies. This article provides such evidence from a new data set on differentiation in European Union treaty law. In addition, it is argued that two logics of treaty-based differentiation are at work. ‘Instrumental differentiation’ originates in enlargement and is motivated by efficiency and distributional concerns. ‘Constitutional differentiation’ has its origins in treaty revisions and is motivated by concerns about national sovereignty and identity. It is driven by Eurosceptic Member States that are opposed ideologically, or fear popular resistance, to the supranational centralization of core state powers.

Technical or Political? An Exploration of the Work of Officials in the Committees of the European Parliament

In conjunction with the gradual empowerment of the European Parliament, interest in its internal politics and in particular its committee system has increased considerably. While much has been learned about the influence of parliamentarians, little is known of the role of their unelected supporters. Although the literature indicates that officials are involved in the policy process, it remains open to question whether their work is fundamentally technical or of relevance to public policy. In a first step towards closing this gap in the literature, this paper explores the role of officials working in the secretariats of European Parliament committees. Although officials are involved in both secretarial and political work, their role is constrained by their position in the parliamentary hierarchy. This supports a cautious understanding of the autonomy and influence of bureaucracy in the Parliament and in the European Unions main institutions.

Parliamentary co-evolution: national parliamentary reactions to the empowerment of the European Parliament

ABSTRACT Existing research on the European Unions (EU) multilevel parliamentary system builds on the hypothesis of parallel evolution, situating explanations for European Parliament (EP) empowerment at the EU level and explanations for national parliamentary powers in EU affairs at the national level. We propose the hypothesis of co-evolution, which specifies a connection between national and European arenas of parliamentarization. We study whether the EPs empowerment enhances or reduces pressure on national parliaments to strengthen their own EU-related competences. First, we argue that national parliamentary parties take conscious positions on the powers of the EP. Second, support for the EP among the party composition of national parliaments tells us whether parliaments regard the EP as a competitor or ally, feeling pressed, or relieved of the pressure, to strengthen their EU-related competences.

Legislative negotiations in the European Parliament

In order to capitalize on its increasing legislative powers, the European Parliament (EP) has had to specialize internally. The scholarly literature has predominantly studied the structural manifestations of specialization, such as the allocation of committee seats among parliamentarians. This article sheds light on a second selection process: participation in legislative negotiations. For every given legislative dossier, parliamentarians have to decide whether and how strongly to participate in the negotiations. The literature on office allocation contains assumptions about the role of office-holders in negotiations. The first aim of this article is to test the validity of these assumptions. The second aim is to apply theories used in studies on office allocation to negotiations and gain insight into the following questions: Are actors with extreme preferences more active than others? What is the role of experts? How do party politics play out? Although we find effects of preferences and expertise on negotiations, the evidence is most compatible with the view that negotiations serve EP party groups to form and exchange policy positions.

Party groups and committee negotiations in the European Parliament: outside attention and the anticipation of plenary conflict

ABSTRACT We study the relationship of the European Parliaments (EP) standing committees and party groups. According to recent studies, committees are the centre of EP policy-making, while party groups enable the transmission of policy positions from specialists to generalists through the mechanism of ‘perceived preference coherence’ (Ringe 2010: 25). We argue that this view underestimates the importance of party groups during the committee stage, if there is outside attention to committee negotiations, or if specialists expect conflict at the plenary stage. Under these conditions, committee members use the party groups to pre-empt the anticipated risk of plenary conflict in an effort to protect their reputation and legislative goals. Finding intra-party co-ordination at the committee stage is important, since the rise of early legislative agreements diminishes the formal relevance of the plenary in EP policy-making. The study of intra-party co-ordination also speaks to a growing scholarly interest in informal European governance.

Eastern enlargement and differentiated integration: towards normalization

ABSTRACT Against the background of theoretical arguments and the historical record, enlargements of the European Union tend to increase differentiated integration. The actual development of differentiation of the 2004 and 2007 accession countries can, therefore, be seen as an indicator of the Union’s integration capacity. We map the newcomers’ differentiated integration since accession, and also distinguish between exemptions and discrimination. Furthermore, we approximate a counterfactual scenario of how their level of differentiation might have developed in the absence of recent accession through a comparison to the Southern member states. Finally, we explore correlations between exemptions, discriminations and two structural country characteristics, wealth and identity. Overall, the level, trajectory and patterns of differentiation point towards a normalization of the new member states’ integration in the Union.

Explaining differentiation in European Union treaties

Since the early 1990s, European integration has become increasingly differentiated. Analysing the conditions under which member states make use of the opportunity to opt out of, or exclude other countries from, European integration, we argue that different explanations apply to treaty and accession negotiations, respectively. Threatening to block deeper integration, member states with strong national identities secure differentiations in treaty reform. In enlargement, in turn, old member states fear economic disadvantages and low administrative capacity and therefore impose differentiation on poor newcomers. Opt-outs from treaty revisions are limited to the area of core state powers, whereas they also occur in the market in the context of enlargement.

Opting out from European Union legislation: the differentiation of secondary law

ABSTRACT Differentiated integration in the European Union (EU) has been primarily discussed and analysed at the treaty level, whereas lack of systematic data has hampered the examination of secondary-law or legislative differentiation. We present a new data set of differentiation in EU legislation from 1958 to 2012, a descriptive analysis and a comparison of the patterns of primary- and secondary-law differentiation across time, member states and policies. We find that differentiation facilitating the accession of new members and constitutional differentiation accommodating the opposition against the integration of core state powers drive both primary- and secondary-law differentiation. In addition, we find complementarity between differentiation in treaty law and secondary legislation depending on the availability and salience of differentiation opportunities.

From capacity to sovereignty: Legislative politics and differentiated integration in the European Union

The literature suggests that legislative politics among European Union Member States is characterised by economic exchanges, and constrained by the social norms of a European community of legislators. Both views draw a clear line between the legislative process and the conflicts over sovereignty that have left their mark on treaty making and European public opinion since the 1990s. This article suggests revisiting this view, based on an analysis of why Member States have opted out of legislation from the 1970s to today. It argues that differentiation, while once a response to capacity problems of relatively poor countries, has recently become driven by sovereignty concerns of the Unions wealthy and nationally oriented Members that oppose the EUs intrusion into core state powers. The article presents evidence for the impact on legislative outcomes of factors so far thought not to matter. The results indicate greater European-level legislative responsiveness towards national sovereignty demands than previously recognised. They underline that the nature of European politics has been changing with the EUs push into core state powers.