Why do member states empower the European Parliament?

Abstract

This is the first study which provides a strategic view on the empowering of the EP by the member states. Compared to the consultation procedure, in which the Council adopts Commission proposals, the EP has become a co-legislator in the codecision procedure, in which it usually promotes an integrationist position favouring policy change. According to this supranational scenario, most scholars conclude that member states intend to increase the legitimacy of the EU rather than their benefits from legislative outcomes. For some authors the empowering of the EP is even a significant example of the limits and deficits of rational choice theory.

From a strategic perspective, however, this study clarifies that member states can benefit from introducing the codecision procedure in the supranational scenario. When the parliament can hardly figure out the complex configuration in the Council, member states can strategically misrepresent their pivotal member's ‘true’ position and present a minority proposal in the conciliation bargains that is more closely located to the status quo. Under these conditions, the introduction of the codecision procedure has several advantages for the member states; in particular it improves the benefits of member states vis-à-vis solutions under the consultation procedure, in which a better informed Commission makes a proposal that must find the support only of a qualified majority of member states.

Keywords:

• Codecision procedure
• democratic deficit
• European Parliament
• strategic bargaining

Notes

1 This scenario is found as the unit of analysis on the proposal level for 25 of the 66 proposals (Junge and König 2007). On a scale ranging from 0 to 100 per issue, the status quo is located on the less integrationist side (SQ < =25) in 37 of the 66 Commission proposals, for which the EP or the Commission promotes the most integrationist position (>75). Using the issues as the unit of analysis, the supranational scenario is revealed in 79 of the 122 issues (with EP or Commission > 75 and SQ < =25).

2 Rittberger and Schimmelfennig (2005) also use the term strategic action for explaining parliamentary empowerment but they relate it to the particular environment of the EU. In other words, they add a second value-oriented dimension to the preference dimension of actors (König and Finke 2006).

3 In the study of König et al. (2007) on bicameral conflict resolution, the Council had maximum heterogeneity in five cases, major differences in preferences in 18 cases and moderate differences in 17 cases, while the EP never had maximum heterogeneity, in only five cases major and in two cases moderate differences in preferences.

4 The DEU data also show that the Commission only has similar positions to the EP in five of the 24 cases in which the supranational scenario exists.

5 Only Majone and Moravcsik dispute this view when they conceive of the EU as a ‘regulatory state’ (Majone 1996, 1998, 2000, 1998, 2002a, 1998, 2000, 1998, 2002b). Such a state does not engage in redistributive or value-allocative policies which receive democratic legitimization by national governments with directly accountable politicians (Moravcsik 2002, 2003, 2004).

6 While the puzzle can be solved if the EP changes its supranational attitude, this study attempts to hold most conditions constant and to find an alternative explanation for the empowering of the EP, given the supranational parliamentary location.

7 Not necessarily in the centre between the EP and Council pivot, but in the centre of their shared win-set. The shared win-set defines the bargaining space because no actor would agree on outcomes which would make them worse off against the status quo.

8 For simplicity, it is assumed that the EP and the Commission share the position, while a more complex characterization would show that the Commission has an incentive to hide (part of the) information when it is more distant to the EP. For example, if the Commission were located on the left side of the dotted line, it would not inform the EP, while it would provide some information if it were located between the dotted and the straight lines.

9 For 37 of the 66 proposals, the Commission or the EP is located in the quartile of the most integrationist actors, providing evidence for the supranational scenario at the level of the unit of analysis. Furthermore, the Commission and the EP only have identical positions in less than half of the cases.

10 For validation of the conciliation data, König et al. (2007) first cross-checked the selected set of issues with official documents revealing that all issues identified by the interviewed experts were either mentioned in the Activity Reports of the EP Conciliation Secretariat or the Legislative Observatory. Upon closer inspection, these documents also provided information about the estimates of 11 cases dealing with budgetary affairs. Standardizing the budgetary figures on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 indicates the highest and 0 the lowest budgetary demand in terms of euros, the point locations of the EP, Council, Commission, status quo and legislative outcome were confirmed exactly (15 per cent of all 73 cases).

11 Arregui et al. (2004) found that Council members change their position over time.

12 The third concerns the outcome of the review clause issue of the Socrates II proposal. The conciliation indicator suggests a split-the-difference compromise between the Council and the EP, while the DEU estimate indicates the total success of the EP. Unfortunately, neither the Legislative Observatory, nor the Activity Reports provide any further information about the outcome of the Socrates II proposal. However, since the split-the-difference estimate of the EP's bargaining success is more conservative than the DEU assessment by a Council expert, there is no evidence for a possible parliamentary bias by interviewing the rapporteurs in favour of the EP.