Codecision: a practitioner's view from inside the Parliament

Abstract

This contribution considers the development of codecision over the last 20 years from a practitioner's point of view, from inside the European Parliament. It argues that the Parliament has adapted its behaviour and increased resources to ensure that the procedure works well and has used its equal status with the Council to influence legislative outcomes. However, this considerable achievement has not been without cost. Parliament has effectively been obliged to adjust to a diplomatic form of negotiations which is of limited interest to the wider public. In broader terms, we suggest that the development of the codecision procedure provides one test of the democratization of the European Union. It points to the balance between the criteria of efficiency and transparency in the legislative process, underlining the weight that has been accorded to the former and the relative lack of attention paid to the latter.

Keywords:

• Codecision
• democracy
• European Parliament
• first reading agreements
• lobbying
• transparency

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank their colleagues in the Parliament, the co-editors of this collection and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this contribution. The views expressed here are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the position of the European Parliament.

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Members of the European Parliament in this article are from parliamentary debates, which can be found by searching with the date at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/debates.html. Debates prior to 1999 are published as an annex to the Official Journal.

In addition, a number of proposals remain blocked in Council after a first reading in Parliament: in October 2012, for example, there were 41 proposals where Parliament had given its first reading between 2000 and the end of 2009 and to which the Council had not yet formally responded.

Figure obtained by a search of PreLex (searching for ‘COD procedures’ and ‘Signature by EP and Council’): http://ec.europa.eu/prelex/apcnet.cfm?CL=en

OJ C 331, 7.12.1993, p. 1.

OJ C 148, 28.5.1999, p. 1.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2007:145:0005:0009:EN:PDF

OJ C 321, 31.12.2003, p. 1

Figures from the annual establishment plan published with the budget of the institution in the Official Journal.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/aboutparliament/en/0081ddfaa4/MEPs.html

Statistics available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/code/about/statistics_en.htm.

That is, the European Council.

See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2011/2298(REG)&l=en

See, for example, http://dianawallismep.org.uk/en/document/trade-in-seal-products-legislative-footprint.pdf.

See, for example, http://www.sven-giegold.de/2012/lobbytransparenz/%20and%20http:/www.conservativeeurope.com/media/ResourceCategories/64/LobbyingContactReportsJan-June11.pdf. For more details on this point, see European Parliament (2009: 29).