The Informal Politics of Codecision: Introducing a New Data Set on Early Agreements in the European Union

Abstract

The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), created in 1992 and directed by Brigid Laffan since September 2013, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research and to promote work on the major issues facing the process of integration and European society.The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes and projects, and a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration and the expanding membership of the European Union. European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) Working Paper SeriesThe European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) was launched in the spring of 2006 as an independent and interdisciplinary academic organization. In 2008, EUDO became a fully-integrated part of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS). Its declared goals are: to produce a permanent and periodic assessment of democratic practices within the EU; to serve as a forum to exchange ideas and good practices; and to be a resource for policy-makers, academics and EU citizens.EUDO focuses its activities around the themes of the four EUDO Observatories, which form the backbone of EUDO and constitute its main organizing principle. They are responsible for data and documentation gathering and are directed by EUI internal professors in conjunction with external EUDO experts. Each Observatory coordinates specific research projects. The four Observatories are: the Observatory on Public Opinion, Political Elites and the Media, the Observatory on Political Parties and Representation, the Observatory on Institutional Reform and Change, and the Observatory on Citizenship.The EUDO working paper series started in December 2009 and aims at disseminating high-quality research on the above-mentioned issues. Not only the directors of the Observatories, but as well EUDO fellows and external experts as well as other scholars and practitioners are welcome to submit their work to the series. AbstractOne of the most important developments in the history of the EU's codecision procedure has been the steep rise in "early agreements" since 1999, and the shift of legislative decision-making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas. As part of a wider research project on "The Informal Politics of Codecision", this working paper launches a new data set on all 797 legislative files concluded under codecision between 1999 and 2009. The paper discusses the process of data collection and coding; explains and justifies the operationalisation and measurement of key variables; and elaborates on the methodological challenges of capturing informal political processes. The paper offers rich descriptive statistics on the scale and scope of early agreements across time, and explores how key characteristics of the legislative file (legal nature, policy area, complexity, salience, policy type, duration) and of the main negotiators (priorities of the Cou...

Loose Ties or Strong Bonds? The Effect of a Commissioner's Nationality and Partisanship on Voting in the Council

“…Bressanelli et al (2014) classify the proposals included in their dataset according to policy type. Based on this, the major conflict dimension for the Commission DGs was classified see Appendix.…”

Power and transparency in political negotiations

“…The member states’ positions are most often aggregated to a Council position using the ‘compromise model’ (Van den Bos, 1991). It is the average over the member states’ positions weighted by salience and either the Banzhaf power index (Banzhaf, 1965) or the Shapley–Shubik power index (Shapley and Shubik, 1954). The compromise model approximates a Nash bargaining solution (Achen, 2006).…”

The Devil Is in the Process: An Analysis of the Impact of Negotiation Processes in Trilogues on Eu Legislation

“…Based on two case studies, they find that it is the priorities of the presidency and especially their proximity to the rapporteur's preferences, as well as perceived or actual urgency of a file that explains early conclusion. In addition, Bresanelli and colleagues find that there is a strong variation of EAs across different policy fields, but that file salience seems to not make a difference, again opposing the assumption that it is mainly technical, non-political files that are fast-tracked (Bressanelli et al, 2014). Interestingly, hence, file characteristics, especially the political importance of a file, do not seem to determine whether the file is negotiated in informal settings, contradicting the narrative that it was mainly invented for dealing with long, technical files.…”

“…Cooper, 2016;Lord, 2013;Reh, 2014;Teffer, 2018). Trilogues, in the end, assemble very few representatives of the institutions behind closed doors, who after months, sometimes years of negotiations come with a fully-fletched agreement, the non-acceptance of which comes with high costs to the institutions (Bressanelli et al, 2014). It is more than understandable that doubts are prevalent on whether these procedures are compatible with the EU's understanding of democracy.…”