https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8657-7326
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ABSTRACT
The European Parliament is one of the most studied legislatures in the world. The general consensus in most of these analyses is that the power of the EP in the legislative processes of the EU has increased precipitously, since the introduction of the co-decision procedure. One continuing perceived weakness of the EP, however, is its inability to introduce new legislation. While the EP can request that the Commission initiate a proposal, it lacks the power to introduce bills itself. This research looks at the indirect agenda power of the EP through an analysis of EP own initiative resolutions and their impact on the policy agenda of the EU. The research introduces anew dataset on all EP resolutions between 2000 and 2015 and compares the pre- and post-2009 period to assess the impact of formal treaty changes to the legislative role of the EP have had on its agenda-setting capacity.
Acknowledegements
The authors wish to thank Callie Burklew and Derek Li for research assistance and Edoardo Bressanelli and Nicola Chelotti as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. All errors of omission and commission rest with the authors alone.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Throughout this work the term ‘Council’ will refer to the Council of the European Union—the second legislative chamber of the EU composed of the cabinet/government ministers of the member states, not to be confused with the European Council or EUCO, the institution housing the Heads of State and Government of the EU member states.
2. Though it should be noted that the formal power of initiation is often devoid of any real capacity to ensure that the proposal is formally and fully vetted through the legislative process (Mattson Citation1995; Anweg and Nijzink Citation1995).
3. The article reads, Tout représentant peut déposer une proposition de résolution À l’adresse de La Haute Autorité, Des Commissions européennes ou Des Conseils. Cette proposition est imprimée, distribuée et renvoyée à la commission compétente.
4. Resolutions introduced through this procedure are labeled as INL rather than INI in the official record.
5. A full understanding of the motivation behind the introduction of individual EPOIR beyond the scope of this research, however, they are generally understood to be reflection of policy priorities that Members of groups within the EP believe should be addressed by the EU. These priorities may reflect partisan, constituency or other interests. As shall be discussed below, EPOIR of not always call for legislative action as they do not always address issues for which the EU has legislative competence.
6. EPOIR prior to 2000 unfortunately cannot be included, as the EP did not begin to formally codify these as INI documents within their internal systems until 2000. This means that while we can search for documents with the word resolution in the title, these are not comparable to the formal INI documents available after 2000. Legislative outcomes are pulled directly (through the EUR-Lex web service) from Eur-lex and currently the available data ends in early 2015—we are not certain why there is no more recent information available. Additional details are provided below.
7. Although our focus is on the agenda setting capacity of the EP, our analysis examines the impact of resolutions on shaping legislative outcomes rather than Commission proposals because we are interested in understanding the influence of EP agenda setting efforts on final policy outcomes.
8. For example, the EP asserted its right to question and approve the incoming Commission President long before this practice was incorporated into the Maastricht Treaty. Indeed, the EP reformed its internal Rules of Procedure to provide for a process—well before it had the formal right of approval.
9. Beyond the formal right to approve the Commission, the EP has also lobbied for and received other non-legislative functions such as oral and written questions, more direct oversight of the commitology process and significantly expanded budgetary authority and (limited) participation in EU economic governance.
10. The power of legislative delay was created indirectly via the Isoglucose ruling of the European Court of Justice in 1980 (Roquette Frères v Council, Case 138/79) and subsequent reforms to the EP’s Rules of Procedure. Direct amendment powers were first introduced in the Single European Act (1987) within the cooperation procedure and the definitive right to veto was included in the codecision procedure introduced in the Maastricht Treaty (1993).
11. The EP’s ability to formally request that the Commission initiate a bill originated in the Maastricht Treaty and was enhanced by the Lisbon Treaty (Article 225 TFEU).
12. Kreppel and Oztas argue that often the Commission serves as a ‘technical’ agenda setter—acting on the policy initiatives and goals of others rather than an autonomous political agenda setter pursuing its own policy preferences.
13. The State of the European Union annual address was instituted by the Lisbon Treaty within the 2010 Framework Agreement on relations between the European Parliament and the European Commission—Annex IV(5). The Commission Annual Work Programme in its current form dates to 2000.
14. This includes basic and amending legislation adopted by the Council or the Council and the EP. Data compiled by the authors from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/statistics/legislative-acts-statistics.html. These numbers do not include ‘non-legislative acts’ or ‘implementing acts’.
15. See, for example recent research on the indirect agenda-setting influence of the European Council through summit conclusions (Allerkamp Citation2014; Reh et al. Citation2011) or lobbying organizations (Greenwood Citation2011; Varela Citation2009).
16. The most recent expansion of EU jurisdiction was the Lisbon Treaty, which significantly expanded the breadth of direct EU legislative activity—while increasing the role of the EP in the legislative process. Despite this, there remain significant policy areas outside of the EU’s reach (such as income tax, citizenship laws and K-12 education) as a result of the subsidiarity imperative to make decisions at the level closest to the citizen possible.
17. While it is nearly impossible to determine the true origin of an idea, we do carefully control for the timing of calls for legislative action in the EPOIR and the inclusion of priority legislative initiatives in the Commission AWP to ensure that the former precede the latter chronologically.
19. Although you can access the EUR-Lex database manually via a browser, our data was drawn programmatically using the webservice EUR-Lex provides, which allow users to query their database directly. Calls to the webservice were made through Java and the resulting XML files were parsed in Java as well.
21. Many of the early documents are available in PDF format; an obvious way to improve the study would be to gather the texts from the PDFs as well.
22. For example: ‘European Parliament called for’, ‘European Parliament Resolution’, as well as the tags used to identify EPOIs, i.e. ‘INI’.
23. The weight for a given keyword was calculated as the inverse of the log of its frequency.
24. Jaccard Similarity is a simple measure of similarity between two sets, calculated as the intersection of the sets divided by their union.
25. For a full explanation of ‘text2vec’ and the various functionalities it offers, see: http://text2vec.org/index.html
26. Scored ranged from 0.433 to 0.311 with a rapid drop in effective matching below 0.32 for this reason we looked only at the top 3,000 scores.
27. Standard OLS regression models are inappropriate when the dependent variable is dichotomous (Long and Freese, Citation2014).
28. It should be remembered that our data do not include EPOIR before 2000, and while some EPOIR are integrated into legislative outcomes during the same year they are adopted, most take 2 or more years. As a result, the data artificially decrease the success rates of EPOIR in 2000, 2001 and even 2002, however are results are robust and consistent when the analysis is run excluding those early years. We leave them in the analysis as there are in fact some EPOIR adopted during this period.
29. This interpretation is addressed further in the discussion surrounding Hypotheses 6 and 6a below.
30. In the absence of any theoretical motivation guiding the selection of the reserve category the first classification is selected. While the relative significance of the policy areas changes depending on the reserve category selected, the impact of including policy area on the full model does not vary.
31. We include all variants of these two party groups across the period covered, e.g. EPP-ED, PES, etc.)
32. The correlation between the number of Eurosceptics opposing an EPOIR and the dichotomous before/after Lisbon variable is −0.64.
33. Note that the model includes a variable for year to mitigate the impact of the changing frequency of the various legislative procedures across time.
