How does the risk of gridlock affect the type of legislative output? Do bureaucratic agents expand their activities when they can expect that the principals are unable to overrule them? This article introduces a novel approach for calculating the risk of gridlock in bicameral legislatures in order to estimate its impact on bureaucratic activities, combining data on all secondary and tertiary acts of the European Union (EU) from 1983 to 2009. The findings reveal that bureaucratic activities expand when the risk of gridlock increases and an overruling of tertiary acts becomes less likely. This may sustain the EU's overall decision-making productivity, but its bureaucratic nature may raise further questions about democratic legitimacy and principal-agent problems in the representation of interests.Legislative scholars have intensely studied the power distribution within legislatures and the factors that promote gridlock. 1 Some scholars have argued that gridlock can improve the quality of legislative output, 2 but a common view in legislative research is that gridlock reduces the likelihood of policy change. 3 Drawing on theories of veto players, 4 party cartels, 5 presidential approval, 6 coalition governments, 7 unified or divided government, 8 and ideological conflict in parliaments, 9 the empirical research mainly supports the effect of this risk on the scale and scope of adopted legislative acts. 10 But how does the risk of gridlock affect the power of the bureaucracy and the type of legislative output? We argue that the risk of gridlock may also change the distribution of

Why do member states with veto power usually support policy change proposed by a Commission initiative when their own position is located closer to the status quo? Why do we frequently witness consensus in the Council and rarely observe a rejection of Commission initiatives even after additional veto players, such as new member states or the European Parliament, have increased the constraints on policy change by legislative decision-making in the European Union (EU)? To answer these questions, this study investigates the voting preferences and logrolling opportunities of the member states on 48 Commission proposals. We find that models that derive the voting preferences from each Commission initiative are scarcely able to explain the consensus in the Council. One reason is that the Commission attempts to avoid a divided Council by initiating proposals for which member states favour a policy change in the same direction. When member states still dispute the size of policy change, we show that they can find a solution by mutually benefiting from logrolling across proposals that either belong to the same policy domain or are negotiated during the same period. Hence, intertemporal and domain-specific logrolling can provide a powerful explanation for consensus even in a contested Council.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract