Agency slack as cause of deviation in trilogue negotiations

ABSTRACT

Trilogues are the main forum for legislative negotiation in the EU. In trilogues, each co-legislator is represented by negotiators, who therefore play a central role in the current EU legislative process. This paper examines whether trilogues enable negotiators therein to slack by deviating more from the mandates they receive when they disagree with their institutions. The extent of deviation is measured using text-mining techniques for 219 negotiations conducted between 2012 and 2018. As a main result, the analysis does not reveal evidence that deviation in trilogues is significantly linked to principal-agent disagreement, neither in the EP, nor in the Council. In other words, the extent of deviation in trilogues does not appear to be the result of negotiators defending positions that are not representative of those of their institutions. This result thus contributes allaying the normative concerns expressed regarding the non-representativity of trilogues compromises, and therefore of EU legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency slack
• deviation index
• legislative negotiations
• ordinary legislative procedure
• principal–agent
• trilogues

Acknowledgements

The author owes many thanks to Tom Delreux for his many valuable comments and encouragements. Thanks are also due to Ferdinand Teuber, Christilla Roederer-Rynning, Gijs Jan Brandsma, Ariadna Ripoll Servent, the editors and the three anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Thomas Laloux is a FRS-FNRS research fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve), Belgium.

Notes

1 The Commission is also represented in trilogues, usually by an official at a high level of the hierarchy – Certain sensitive negotiations even involving the competent Commissioners- together with support staff’ (Roederer-Rynning & Greenwood, 2015).

2 Several other actors may also be present in trilogue meetings, especially on the EP's side, such as group coordinators and MEPs’ assistants. As a result, trilogue meetings can sometimes gather up to 100 people.

3 Because they provide both the mandate and the authorization, COREPER and the responsible committee are, arguably, the direct principals of agents negotiating in trilogues, thereby forming a chain of delegation from institutions to trilogues (Laloux, 2020)

4 One could also expect the opposite to happen, that is, that time pressure on agents decreases deviation. This would happen if negotiators tried to speed up the process by trading items between their respective mandates, rather than finding new solutions which increase deviation.

5 See Cross and Hermansson (2017) for a deeper discussion of this method strength and limitation, notably the fact that it gives the same weight to all modifications.

6 I thank one of the anonymous referees for mentioning this point.

7 I thank one of the anonymous referees for mentioning this point.

8 However, it is important to note that the role presidency and rapporteur play during the intra-institutional process may enable them to slack before trilogues. In turn, trilogues would enable them to hide this bias by decreasing the control on the initial positions.