Bargaining power in informal trilogues: Intra-institutional preference cohesion and inter-institutional bargaining success

Abstract

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.

The institutional and political roots of complex policies: Evidence from the European Union

“…Finally, the models contain a control variable capturing the distance of the Commissioner responsible for the draft proposal from the Commission median to take into account that extreme positions could matter more if they are held by the lead Commissioner. In addition, I control for the number of Commissioners present in the CoC, for the preference heterogeneity in the EP and the Council (using data shared by Haag (2022)), as well as measures for the distance between the Commission median and the median in the other legislative chambers.…”

Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament

“…In addition to their relevance for the EP's legislative organization, several studies have demonstrated that rapporteurs tend to be quite successful in shaping legislative outcomes in their favor (Costello and Thomson, 2010; Costello and Thomson, 2011). Especially in the informal setting of inter-institutional trilogues, rapporteurs are often able to wield substantial policy influence (Brandsma and Hoppe, 2021; Haag, 2022). Moreover, even though their draft reports are subject to an open amendment rule at the committee level of the EP, the rapporteur position is only rarely challenged successfully by competing amendments (Hurka, 2013).…”