Search results

Europe has brought about important changes in representation by strengthening the ability of national interest groups to influence policy at the expense of national political parties. Nevertheless, results from a project on the relationship between interest groups and political parties in Denmark, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom show that interest groups still attach high priority to interacting with national political parties in EU politics and that their party contacts have not moved to Brussels. Instead, national and European party contacts strengthen each other. Moreover, it is not the most but the least Europeanized groups that attach the lowest priority to interacting with national political parties in EU policy. Thus, the strategic adaptations in representation to the new EU opportunity structure may not be as serious as feared by some of the critics of EU democracy.

Time choices are a neglected aspect of the bicameral bargaining literature, even though they may both affect the efficiency of decision-making and have broader democratic implications. An analytical framework is developed to explain when early conclusion occurs in the legislative process. Testing the main implications of this model on the co-decision procedure of the European Union, the results offer a more positive view of early agreements in this system than the existing literature. The findings show that these deals are unlikely to occur when the European Parliament is represented by agents with biased views of the overall legislature. The conventional wisdom that the character of the negotiated files plays a role in explaining whether legislative files are concluded early is also rejected. Instead, bargaining uncertainty and the impatience of the co-legislators matter.

International audience ; Since the introduction of the co-decision legislative procedure, the EU has had the possibility to resort to a Conciliation Committee made up of representatives from the European Parliament and the Council to reconcile differences between the two bodies. This article assesses whether the members of this committee have an incentive to take advantage of their ability to present take-it-or-leave-it offers to their parent bodies by examining whether they are representative of their full body and/or whether they represent other interests inside or outside their legislative body. It concludes that the EU Conciliation Committee is generally representative of its parent bodies and that the option to go to conciliation is not a risky tool for them to reach agreement.

Since the introduction of the co-decision legislative procedure, the EU has had the possibility to resort to a Conciliation Committee made up of representatives from the European Parliament and the Council to reconcile differences between the two bodies. This article assesses whether the members of this committee have an incentive to take advantage of their ability to present take-it-or-leave-it offers to their parent bodies by examining whether they are representative of their full body and/or whether they represent other interests inside or outside their legislative body. It concludes that the EU Conciliation Committee is generally representative of its parent bodies and that the option to go to conciliation is not a risky tool for them to reach agreement.

Important rules regulating conciliation committees in the EU and the U.S. look similar but are applied very differently in practice. This article examines why rule application is different in the two systems. In accordance with insights from recent institutional literature, the results show that differences in rule application can be explained on the basis of variation in rule ambiguity between the two systems, and how much bargaining power the actors interested in strategically selecting between or modifying the rules have. They also add to the literature by underlining the fact that ambiguity in which rule to apply, or how to interpret a given rule, is not a necessary condition for these procedural choices. The results are thus not only relevant to scholars interested in bicameral bargaining, but also to scholars with a general interest in rule application.

Since the introduction of the co-decision legislative procedure, the EU has had the possibility to resort to a Conciliation Committee made up of representatives from the European Parliament and the Council to reconcile differences between the two bodies. This article assesses whether the members of this committee have an incentive to take advantage of their ability to present take-it-or-leave-it offers to their parent bodies by examining whether they are representative of their full body and/or whether they represent other interests inside or outside their legislative body. It concludes that the EU Conciliation Committee is generally representative of its parent bodies and that the option to go to conciliation is not a risky tool for them to reach agreement.

There are broader democratic implications in whether legislative deals are concluded between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers in the co-decision procedure at first reading, as the potential of different interests within the legislative bodies to affect the outcomes varies considerably between this and the later reading stages. This paper therefore examines the extent to which six different explanations can account for early agreement and uses a dataset with all procedures that had their first reading in the first five years after the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty. The key conclusion is that factors that the institutions themselves attached importance to before the Amsterdam Treaty entered into force, such as workload and the character of the file, do not have explanatory power, whereas others, such as how close a working relationship exists between the co-legislators, the size of the file negotiated, and whether it is a new act do. Moreover, the paper adds to existing evidence of the relevance of party politics within the institutions by demonstrating that party interests also play a role across them. The chance of early conclusion increases if the negotiators from the Council and the European Parliament come from the same party family.