No abstract

This article investigates the impact of policy complexity on the duration of legislative negotiations in the European Union employing survival analysis. We conceptualize policy complexity as a three-dimensional construct encompassing structural, linguistic and relational components. Building on this conceptual framework, we measure the complexity of 889 Commission proposals published under the ordinary legislative procedure between 2009 and 2018. Controlling for institutional and political drivers of legislative duration identified by previous studies, we show that different types of policy complexity influence the duration of the decision-making process in the European Union to varying degrees, at different points in time and partially in unexpected ways. On a general level, our study highlights that developing a better understanding of the origins and consequences of policy complexity in the European Union is a key task for scholars of European integration.

Informal trilogue meetings are the main legislative bargaining forum in the European Union, yet their dynamics remain largely understudied in a quantitative context. This article builds on the assumption that the negotiating delegations of the European Parliament and the Council play a two-level game whereby these actors can use their intra-institutional constraint to extract inter-institutional bargaining success. Negotiators can credibly claim that their hands are tied if the members of their parent institutions hold similar preferences and do not accept alternative proposals or if their institution is divided and negotiators need to defend a fragile compromise. Employing a measure of document similarity (minimum edit distance) between an institution's negotiation mandate and the trilogue outcome to measure bargaining success, the analysis supports the hypothesis for the European Parliament, but not for the Council.

Experience and loyalty have been identified as major explanations for why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are selected as committee rapporteurs in the European Parliament. Yet, existing research implicitly assumes that these explanations operate in isolation of what the report is about. In this article, we hypothesize that the effects of experience and loyalty on MEPs’ chances to become rapporteurs should be conditioned by the complexity of the Commission's legislative proposal. We show that party group coordinators indeed distribute the most complex legislative tasks to highly experienced MEPs but cannot confirm such a conditional relationship for the effect of loyalty. Our study contributes to the literature on the legislative organization in the European Parliament by highlighting the role of proposal complexity for the report allocation process.