EU conciliation delegates: Responsible or runaway agents?

Abstract

This analysis tests the assumptions of the principal–agent model on delegation in EU conciliation processes and discusses the implications of the empirical results for the value of the model as a general framework of delegation. It shows that irresponsible behaviour by the EU conciliation committee is rare, contrary to the usual prediction of the principal–agent framework, because a series of the common assumptions of the model are not fulfilled. It is argued that, in a number of cases, the principal–agent model may still be relevant if some of its assumptions are endogenised into the model as characteristics of the environment, but that there may be other types of delegation where the core assumptions of the model do not apply. The findings are generated on the basis of different data sources such as official documents from the EU institutions, descriptive statistics and semi-structured interviews.

Notes

I would like to thank Michael Shackleton, Gerald Schneider and two anonymous referees for comments and the European Commission for research support.

1. The 15 areas of Community activity with co-decision in the Maastricht Treaty have been extended with each new treaty, meaning that the total number of legal bases at present is 40 (Parliament 2004a: 4).

2. Roughly speaking, the existing studies can be divided into those which examine the power of the Institutions in co-decision and/or compare the power of these across different decision-making procedures (for example Crombez 1997; Rittberger 2000; Tsebelis and Garrett 2000; Tsebelis et al. 2001; Maurer 2003; Rasmussen 2003) and those which study the functioning and development of the formal and informal procedures in practice (for example Earnshaw and Judge 1995; Boyron 1996; Garman and Hilditch 1998; Shackleton 2000; Shackleton and Raunio 2003; Farrell and Héritier 2003 2004).

3. Twenty-two per cent of the files required conciliation in the 1999–2004 legislative term of the Parliament compared with 40 per cent in the former five-year period under the Maastricht provisions (Parliament 2004b: 12).

4. There are currently three Treaty articles where unanimity in the Council is always required. In the Maastricht version of the procedure, the conciliation committee could also be used right after the adoption of the Council's common position if the Parliament declared its intention to reject it. This ‘petit conciliation’ has only been used twice (Engine power in 1994 (COD 1991 371) and European Capital of Culture in 1999 (COD 1997 0290)) and is not included here.

5. Whereas there was no time limit for the conciliation committee to be convened in the Maastricht Treaty, the Amsterdam and Nice Treaties specify that the committee has to be convened six (with a possible extension of two) weeks after the Council has declared that it will not be able to accept all the Parliament's second reading amendments.

6. The trialogues between the Council, the Parliament and the Commission became standard practice under the Spanish Presidency in the second half of 1995 and are restricted forums with representatives from the three Institutions (Parliament 2000a: 14).

7. Altogether 44 interviews were carried out in June 2000, November 2001, 2002 and 2003 with Members of Parliament, Council Deputy Permanent Representatives, and officials from the Parliament, the Council and the Commission.

8. The two cases were Voice Telephony (COD 1994 437) and Transferable Securities (COD 1995 188), where disagreements over comitology prevented agreement from being reached in the committee. The Council decided to reconfirm its common position on voice telephony, but the Parliament rejected it subsequently (Parliament 1995: 10). Instead, the Council decided not to reconfirm its common position on Transferable Securities (Parliament 1999a: 6).

9. The clarification would not have made a difference in this case, where there were eight votes in favour of the joint text.

10. We included annual conciliation reports since 1994 and co-decision studies from the Parliament, internal co-decision seminars from the institutions, speeches and press releases from co-decision seminars, and co-decision guides from the institutions.

11. So-called ‘Deputy Permanent Representatives’ except in a limited number of fields, where COREPER II is responsible (Parliament 2003a: 6). The country holding the six months rotating Presidency is represented at ministerial level. Right in the beginning of co-decision, more ministers were present at conciliation meeting, but this soon changed (Parliament 1995: 14).

12. In the fifth session of the Parliament, 75 per cent of the full conciliation delegates were either full or substitute members of the committee which had dealt with the file prior to conciliation. If we exclude the permanent members, i.e. the vice-presidents, the figure rises to 92 per cent.

13. Moreover, potentially it can be seen as a representativeness problem that the attendance of delegates is not always high (Parliament 2003b: 7) and that the smaller political groups have sometimes been reluctant to appoint their members (Parliament 2001: 16).

14. The wording in the initial conciliation handbook is a little different from that in the latest. Thus, it states that, ‘officials of the political groups and the relevant services of the EP secretariat are allowed to attend the meetings’ (1999b: 13).

15. The 1999 and 2000 conciliation guides do not include exactly this wording but state that ‘The results of the trialogues are discussed and possibly approved at the meetings of the respective delegations’ (Parliament 1999b: 10, 2000b: 11).

16. The general lesson is that delegation is successful if the agent has ‘an incentive to make a proposal that is better for the principal than the status quo [author: the outcome the principal would have realised without delegation]’ (the incentive condition) and ‘if the principal can correctly infer whether or not the agent's proposal is better than the status quo’ (the knowledge condition). It fails if none of the conditions are satisfied (Lupia and McCubbins 2000: 298–9).