The conciliation committee is the ultimate bicameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? We argue that its institutional setup is biased in favour of the Council of Ministers. Employing the Wordfish algorithm, we show that the joint text is more similar to the Council common position than to the parliamentary reading in almost 70 percent of the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. The European Parliament is more successful in the post-Amsterdam period, when the Council decides by qualified majority voting, the rapporteur comes from a large party, the European Commission is supportive, and when national administrations are more involved in the implementation process than the Commission.

The functional pressures shaping policy design may be disrupted in salient policies and politicised contexts, according to recent postfunctionalist/new intergovernmentalist theories. We contrast these expectations with those derived from liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism by analysing the reforms of the European Union economic governance. Its Council-centred enforcement, which has been a dominant feature until the euro crisis, despite noncompliance, does not sit comfortably with traditional theories but can be explained by policy salience and implementation uncertainties. Instead, the emphasis that traditional approaches assign to noncompliance, commitment problems, threats of exclusion and veto, issue linkages, path dependencies and supranational decision-making, allows to adequately account for the overall direction of reforms toward more tightening and delegation, notwithstanding the pooled enforcement in recent ancillary measures. Postfunctionalist theories overall fall short in highly politicised contexts, exactly where they should do most of the explaining. We conclude discussing politicization as a strategic elite response.

Since 1997 the Economic and Monetary Union has been centred on the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), which provides the framework for the coordination of economic policies and the surveillance of fiscal policies of member states. The country-specific recommendations, which address the member states' macroeconomic programmes, are the policy instruments of the SGP preventive arm. At the same time, these recommendations are the object of intense negotiation between the Commission and the Council. Why are these recommendations a matter of bargaining between the Commission and the Council? What are the factors that determine the negotiation outcomes? Employing a provisionby-provision text analysis, I show that the Council strengthens almost 50 percent of the country-specific recommendations proposed by the Commission between 1999 and 2015. The Council tightens the recommendations during the financial crisis and against highly indebted countries. Recommendations addressed to large countries are instead less likely to be tightened.

Country‐specific recommendations (CSRs) were introduced by the Stability and Growth Pact and offered guidance to countries in fiscal policies. Coordination was very limited and unsystematic in terms of policies and obligations. In the aftermath of the euro area financial crisis, the European Union reinforces the pre‐existing policy cycle with the European Semester. Why do countries implement CSRs? Are there explanatory differences in their implementation before and after the introduction of the European Semester? We argue that the study of the entire history of the CSRs provides a unique chance to unravel opposite causal mechanisms. Employing an original dataset, we show that, in the first period, electoral proximity reduces implementation. We find also that, if a country is in (out of) the euro area, it is more (less) inclined to adhere to the CSRs as inflation increases. In the European Semester, instead, inflationary pressure and higher costs of enforcement increase implementation.

In the European Union, states can distribute enforcement prerogatives between a supranational agency, over which they exercise equal influence, and a Council of ministers, where power resources mostly vary by country size. What shapes attitudes towards different enforcement designs? States at greater risk of noncompliance should eschew deeper cooperation and prefer procedures over which they can exercise more influence. Employing an original data set of positions on relevant contested issues during the negotiations over fiscal governance rules from 1997 to 2012, we show that governments at greater risk of noncompliance prefer greater discretion and, if they have higher voting power, more Council involvement in enforcement. These factors only partially explain positions on Commission empowerment. Given their greater indeterminacy, attitudes are also shaped by national public opinion.