This article investigates a widespread yet understudied trend in EU politics: the shift of legislative decision making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas and the subsequent adoption of legislation as "early agreements." Since its introduction in 1999, "fast-track legislation" has increased dramatically, accounting for 72% of codecision files in the Sixth European Parliament. Drawing from functionalist institutionalism, distributive bargaining theory, and sociological institutionalism, this article explains under what conditions informal decision making is likely to occur. The authors test their hypotheses on an original data set of all 797 codecision files negotiated between mid-1999 and mid-2009. Their analysis suggests that fast-track legislation is systematically related to the number of participants, legislative workload, and complexity. These findings back a functionalist argument, emphasizing the transaction costs of intraorganizational coordination and information gathering. However, redistributive and salient acts are regularly decided informally, and the Council presidency's priorities have no significant effect on fast-track legislation. Hence, the authors cannot confirm explanations based on issue properties or actors' privileged institutional positions.
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This article analyses the role of the European Council in two key legislative packages on economic and budgetary coordination, the SixPack and the Two-Pack, which were negotiated under the ordinary legislative procedure. It assesses how and to what extent the key actor in the literature on the new intergovernmentalism -the European Council -2 is able to curb the powers of the supranational institutions -the Commission and the European Parliament -in a policy area where the community method has been applied since the Treaty of Lisbon. It tracks the development of the legislative negotiations -from the stages preceding the Commission's proposal to their conclusions, relying on official documents, press reports and 30 original interviews with key decision-makers. The strong role of the European Council both as an agenda-setter and in the legislative negotiations stands out, and suggests that the implications of new intergovernmentalism may well extend beyond intergovernmental decision-making processes.
This contribution conceptualises bottom-up politicisation in Europe's multi-level system. EU-level actors, we argue, respond strategically to the functional and political pressures 'travelling up' from the member states. Perceiving domestic dissensus as either constraining or enabling, actors display both self-restraint and assertiveness in their responses. Motivated by the survival of the EU as a system 'under attack', and by the preservation of their own substantive and procedural powers, actors choose to either politicise or depoliticise decisionmaking, behaviour and policy outcomes at the supranational level. As a collection, this Special Issue demonstrate that the choices actors make 'under stress' at the EU-levelranging from 'restrained depoliticisation' to 'assertive politicisation'are, indeed, conditional on how bottom-up pressures are perceived and processed.
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