Enduring consensus: why the EU legislative process stays the same

ABSTRACT

The multiple crises that the EU has faced over the last decade could lead observers to expect an increase in conflicts within its legislative process and, eventually, a shift from a consensual mode to a majoritarian and politicized mode. The dataset The EU Legislative Output 1996–2019 indicates that this has occurred only to a moderate extent. To explore this enduring consensus, we analyse quantitative and qualitative data on law making within the Council of the EU and the European Parliament and proceed to a systematic diachronic comparison. We argue that, as before the crisis, consensus remains a norm and results from cooperation based strategies. Furthermore, new factors, such as the extension of the ordinary legislative procedure, a pro-EU alliance within the European Parliament and the smaller number of legislative proposals, foster consensus.

KEYWORDS:

• EU institutions
• consensus
• compromise
• EU legislative process

Acknowledgement

Our warm thanks go to the EU officials, national representatives and members of the European Parliament who agreed to be interviewed and to Renaud Dehousse. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, Manuele Citi and Dimiter Toshkov for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Centre de Données Socio-Politiques [dataset] (CDSP, CNRS–Sciences Po) and Centre d’Études Européennes (CEE, CNRS-Sciences Po) [productors], Centre de Données Socio-Politiques [distributor].Unless otherwise specified, we use this dataset.

2. We begin in 1996 because institutional archives for the period prior to 1996 are not available online. For the EP, we collected data until 05/31/2019; for the Council, we collected data until 12/31/2019.

3. These statistics start in 2004, as the EP does not provide with roll call votes for the period 1996–2004.

4. When we cite our interviews, we use the following referencing system: I-year-number. The interviews cited in the paper are listed in Appendix 1.

5. Source: https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/?fuseaction=search, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/homepage.html, Häge 2011 and Schout and Schwieter (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (project ANR-12-BSH1-0012).