Quiet early bird or loud late riser? Parliamentary activities and types of European Parliament involvement during the negotiation of international agreements

ABSTRACT

This paper inductively distinguishes six types of European Parliament (EP) involvement in the negotiation of international agreements. Since 2009, the EP has veto power on international agreements and has leveraged it through various activities such as resolutions. However, there exists no cross-case characterization of the EP’s involvement. Therefore, this paper asks: what are the types of EP involvement during the negotiation of international agreements? To systematically compare the nature, frequency and timing of EP activities, sequence analysis is applied to a dataset of EP activities relative to the 344 agreements concluded since 2009. For a majority of agreements, the EP acts as a ‘bystander’ and does not conduct any activities. When it does conduct activities, the EP most frequently acts as a ‘loud late riser’ and is active only during the ratification stage. For other agreements, EP involvement is very diverse regarding the timing and frequency of activities.

KEYWORDS:

• European parliament
• international agreements
• consent procedure
• sequence analysis
• timing
• EU external action

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2024.2360165

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Tom Delreux, Thomas Laloux, the two anonymous reviewers, the journal editors and participants to conferences who commented on the paper for their helpful feedback and suggestions. This research has benefitted from the advice of the Statistical Methodology and Computing Service (SMCS) of the University of Louvain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Additional provisions are made for trade agreements at article 207 TFEU. Agreements concerning monetary or foreign exchange regime are negotiated on the basis of article 219 TFEU, which provides that the EP is ‘consulted’. Less than 10 agreements were concluded on this latter basis since the entry into force of the Lisbon treaty (own database).

2. Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ACTA (in 2011), the so-called SWIFT agreement (in 2010) and a fisheries protocol with Morocco (in 2011).

3. Before the entry into force of the Lisbon treaty, even if the EP had much less powers, it was nevertheless conducting some activities: there are activities of EP involvement to study even before 2009.

4. Last data triangulation on the basis of EP procedures present on the EP Legislative Observatory on 24/04/2023.

5. See methodological annex for more details on the creation of this database and data collection.

6. See methodological annex for an explanation of the number of types chosen.

7. Two types distinguished following these criteria were merged because of their similarity conceptually and to allow for more parsimony of the typology.

8. See methodological annex figure 9 for data on the nature of EP activities and types of EP involvement.

9. See methodological annex for more details.

10. See methodological annex for statistics on the relation between types of EP involvement and policy field.

Additional information

Funding

Marine Bardou is an Aspirante of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique -FNRS.

Notes on contributors

Marine Bardou

Marine Bardou is a PhD candidate at the Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain-Europe (ISPOLE), University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.