Examining the impact of institutions on common pool resource problems: the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy

ABSTRACT

Why is there variation in the level of overfishing in European Union member states? The Common Fisheries Policy sets politically-negotiated quotas for fishing, but different states break the quotas at different levels. One answer for this variation lies within the domestic institutions of the member states themselves, in particular the incentives created by various electoral rules. Electoral rules which add more political parties to the decisionmaking process result in greater amounts of overfishing because smaller and smaller blocks of voters are more important in such instances. Evidence in favor of this theory comes from a unique window into fisheries compliance: the ‘scorecards’ produced by the European Commission from 2001 to 2004.

KEYWORDS:

• Common Fisheries Policy
• environmental policy
• compliance
• political parties

Acknowledgments

Earlier drafts were presented at the annual meetings of the Southern Political Science Association and the International Studies Association-West and conferences on “The EU as a Global Actor: Perspectives on Power,” and “Institutions and Change in Contemporary Politics.” Thanks to Fabio Franchino for generous sharing of data, and Josh Bridwell, Clifford Carrubba, Drew Linzer, and Nigel Lo for comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. With the exception of Peru, few developing-world states have distant-water fleets fishing in international waters.

2. This provision is one of the reasons Norway voted against accession to the EU in 1972.

3. Many of the EU’s fisheries regulations since the 1970s have been at least in part responses to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (see Bailey 1996).

4. During the time period under discussion in this paper, the Parliament was largely shut out of the policy process. Even after Lisbon, MEPs on the Committee on Fisheries complained that the Council had ‘sought to circumvent Parliament’s co-legislative powers.’ (‘20 Years of Codecision’ 2013, 8).

5. In addition to the TAC and quota systems, the EU also attempts to restrict fishing by limiting time fleets can spend at sea, controlling the holding capacity of fleets, setting minimum allowable sizes for species, and regulating fishing gear (Daw and Gray 2005).

6. Overfishing is rational on the part of individual fishermen. Economic discount rate theory would argue that the economically efficient strategy regarding a diminishing common pool resource is to take as much of the resource as possible, then invest the profits (the discount rate is even higher when one considers mortgaged boats and equipment). (Daw and Gray 2005) Moreover, the penalty for overfishing is not stringent enough to discourage individual overfishing.

7. See also Hallerberg and Marier (2004) for an example from Latin America and the Caribbean.

8. A third approach, such as outlined in Cheibub 2006, would involve presidential versus parliamentary systems. Such an approach cannot be tested in the E.U., which lacks true presidential systems.

9. The unit of analysis is the country-year.

10. I do not control for exports of fish from EU countries, for fear of endogeneity with the other two control variables.

11. Some may argue that fixed effects need to be added to the regression to actually model the processes described above. However, fixed effects ‘black box’ what is actually going on inside a given country; miles of coastline, as a country-specific, time-invariant variable, is both empirically and theoretically appropriate, and would run collinear with the fixed effect. Running a linear regression with panel-corrected standard errors produces no differences in the statistical significance of the coefficients in either model.