Negotiating the Post‐Lisbon Comitology System: Institutional Battles over Delegated Decision‐Making

Abstract

The 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 Principal–Agent Model, Accountability and Democratic Legitimacy

“…The investiture procedure of the Commission is a case in point, with the European Parliament and the Council both attempting to be decisive in the selection of candidates and tempting to tie the Commission's hands to policy commitments as well as to procedural commitments during the selection process (Magnette 2001;Brandsma 2013). The same applies to the legislative process where the Council and the European Parliament jointly agree on a legislative text, but executive powers which are delegated by the Commission are controlled by the member states alone, or independently by the Council and the European Parliament rather than jointly (Christiansen and Dobbels 2013;Brandsma and Blom-Hansen 2012). Similar difficulties can be observed in the realm of foreign policy, where the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is part of both the European Council and the Commission.…”

Lobbying in the EU Comitology System

“…Since the post-Lisbon comitology system only comprises the advisory procedure and revised versions of the management and regulatory procedures (cf. Brandsma and Blom-Hansen 2012), the European Parliament now appears to play a more limited role in regards to the adoption of implementing acts. The introduction of delegated acts, however, foresees a considerable scrutiny role for the European Parliament, while comitology committees are the ones which lack formal scrutiny power.…”

“…Moreover, the European Parliament has been granted access to the aforementioned expert groups. This was obtained as part of the inter-institutional negotiations on the 2011 comitology reform (Brandsma and Blom-Hansen 2012). This fact, combined with the European Parliament's considerable scrutiny role in relation to delegated acts, is likely to make the Parliament an attractive lobbying target.…”

“…Direct Council and Parliament control of the new delegated acts reduces comitology and abolishes the regulatory procedure with scrutiny. But the 2011 reform expands comitology to include the common commercial policy (Brandsma and Blom-Hansen 2012). In sum, comitology continues to be a standard control mechanism in EU delegated decision-making.…”

“…Direct control will gradually replace the regulatory procedure with scrutiny in a process expected to be completed by 2014 (Hardacre and Kaeding 2011). In 2011, a new comitology regulation was adopted that changes the management and regulatory procedures into a new examination procedure (Brandsma and Blom-Hansen 2012;European Parliament and Council 2011).…”