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AbstractWe argue that the European Commission, like national governments, is likely to have used the Covid‐19 crisis as an opportunity to bolster its own powers. We focus on the Commission's attempts to insert into legal proposals provisions to adopt delegated or implementing acts, as this is the only possible way to gain lasting rule‐making powers. We analyse all the Commission's legal proposals for an equal time span before and after the start of the Covid‐19 crisis and study whether the number of proposed delegation provisions has changed after the onset of the crisis. The analysis, to our surprise, does not show any clear evidence of a self‐empowerment strategy. In the conclusion, we discuss likely explanations for this non‐finding.

The European Union, the United States, and Germany are characterised by what political scientists call strong bicameralism. These systems feature two legislative bodies (houses or chambers) of relative equality of standing and lack of political congruence, owing to their dissimilar political composition. In all three systems, laws cannot be passed unless they are approved by both chambers in identical form. Strong bicameralism invites discord between the chambers while making it necessary for them to accommodate their differences to exert power. These tensions make negotiations between the chambers (inter-cameral negotiations) an integral feature of legislative politics. Beyond these similarities, the three political systems display important differences in the specific legislative procedures and the composition of the chambers. In addition, they are embedded in very different political contexts. One basic contextual difference is that the European Union, unlike the United States and Germany, is not a state; and that EU Member States have retained more power than the US States and the German Länder. With this comparison, we hope to contribute to a broader and ongoing reflection about what is unique and not so unique about the EU, and what insights can be learned from other political systems. The United States and Germany were indeed a source of inspiration for drawing up the legislative procedure of the EU. We proceed case by case, starting briefly with the EU before turning our attention to the United States and Germany.2 For each case, we outline (1) the basic law-making institutions, (2) the process of inter-cameral conflict resolution, and (3),the political and public pressures for change.

Most European Union rules are made by the Commission, not the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament. But although the Commission is an important rule-maker, it is not autonomous. The member states have always taken care to install committees to control the Commission (comitology). However, the Lisbon Treaty introduced alternative control mechanisms (delegated acts) and a reform of the comitology system (implementing acts). This article investigates how the post-Lisbon control system works in daily legislative practice. It represents the first investigation of the institutional preferences of the Council, the Parliament and the Commission in the new system. Further, it utilizes better data than previous studies. The analysis is based on data on the control preferences of all actors before the first trilogue meeting for a large number of cases in the period 2010–13. The results indicate that the institutional battle over the control of delegated rule-making is far from over. ; Most European Union rules are made by the Commission, not the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament. But although the Commission is an important rule-maker, it is not autonomous. The member states have always taken care to install committees to control the Commission (comitology). However, the Lisbon Treaty introduced alternative control mechanisms (delegated acts) and a reform of the comitology system (implementing acts). This article investigates how the post-Lisbon control system works in daily legislative practice. It represents the first investigation of the institutional preferences of the Council, the Parliament and the Commission in the new system. Further, it utilizes better data than previous studies. The analysis is based on data on the control preferences of all actors before the first trilogue meeting for a large number of cases in the period 2010–13. The results indicate that the institutional battle over the control of delegated rule-making is far from over.

AbstractThe Lisbon Treaty represented a rare opportunity to redesign parliamentary control of the European Commission's delegated powers. The new Treaty distinguishes between delegated and implementing acts and specifies that comitology rules must be decided by a co‐decision regulation. This necessitated a reform of the comitology system, which was decided in December 2010 after protracted inter‐institutional negotiations. This article asks why the new control system took its final form. The negotiations as a game of control positions are analyzed and the course of the negotiations is traced through documents and interviews. Support is found for the article's hypotheses, but it is also the case that events in some respects went further than expected.

The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty has presented the three EU institutions with a rare opportunity to completely re-design the system of control of the Commission's delegated powers. Hitherto, the Commission's ability to adopt implementing measures was controlled via the by now well-known comitology system, that has undergone only minor changes since it was introduced in the early 1960s. Since the new Treaty distinguishes between delegated and implementing acts, and also specifies that the rules of the game for implementing acts have to be decided via a co-decision regulation, all institutions attempted to secure strong control positions in the newly emerging system. Now that the new system has been finally agreed upon, this paper asks the qui bono question: Who benefits from the new system, and how did those actors get what they wanted? In our analysis we treat the negotiations on the new system as a game of structural choice, and trace back the course of the negotiations through a close analysis of formal and informal documents and interviews. Although in the end we find much support for our hypotheses, we find that the course of events in some respects has gone further than we theoretically expected.

AbstractTwo images exist of the day‐to‐day practice of the EU comitology system. The first claims that comitology is deliberation by policy experts in which informal norms, deliberation and good arguments matter more than economic interests and formal voting rules. The second image portrays comitology as an arena for intergovernmental bargaining designed by the Member States to control the Commission. The article systematically investigates these images based on survey evidence from a questionnaire to the Danish and Dutch national representatives on nearly all comitology committees in 2006. The evidence suggests that both images hold and that their relative importance is determined by the nature of the issues dealt with by the individual comitology committees.

AbstractDuring the 2010s, research focusing on the dismantling of policies grew considerably and contributed to a better understanding of the dynamics of policy change. Policy termination, that is, the complete deleting of policies, is a separate but equally relevant concept, yet it has been overlooked due to the difficulty of obtaining the extensive datasets needed to demonstrate patterns. We seek to fill this gap in research by providing a first analysis of policy termination in the European Union (EU), based on a dataset of over 120,000 EU policies. After differentiating the concept of termination from dismantling, we analyse the prevalence of termination between 1971 and 2021 across all policy areas. We show that termination is a constant but limited feature of EU policy‐making, and, in contrast to existing assumptions, termination was not more prominent during the 2010s despite the rhetorical commitments to more streamlined regulation.