Beyond Comitology: A Comparative Analysis of Implementation Procedures with Parliamentary Involvement

The EU Comitology System in Theory and Practice

“…According to the latter procedure, the Commission's proposal can only be referred to the Council if a qualified majority can be mustered in the committee, while the former procedure only requires a blocking minority. Formal game theoretical analyses confirm this rank order of the comitology procedures (Steunenberg et al, 1996(Steunenberg et al, , 1997Ballman et al, 2002). In terms of constraining the Commission the comitology procedures can be summarized in this way:…”

“…The accepted view is that, among the pre-Lisbon procedures, the regulatory procedure is more restrictive than the management procedure, which again is more restrictive than the advisory procedure. This hierarchical ordering has been confirmed by game theoretical analyses of the procedures (Steunenberg et al, 1996(Steunenberg et al, , 1997Ballman et al, 2002). After the Lisbon Treaty the regulatory and management procedures have been merged into a new so-called examination procedure, while the advisory procedure is unchanged.…”

“…The exact nature of the various comitology procedures has changed over time, but until the Lisbon Treaty they were always referred to as the advisory, management, regulatory and safeguard procedures, and they constrained the Commission to varying degrees. As game theoretic analyses confirm, the safeguard procedure was the strictest, the regulatory procedure was stricter than the management procedure, which again was stricter than the advisory procedure (Steunenberg et al, 1996(Steunenberg et al, , 1997Ballman et al, 2002). Following the Lisbon Treaty, a compromise has been reached that the four comitology procedures are simplified into two new procedures: an advisory procedure that is identical to the previous advisory procedure and a new examination procedure.…”

“…Pollack, 2003b). Some scholars, most famously Joerges and Neyer (1997a, b), argue that comitology committees function as deliberative arenas for policy experts, while other scholars portray them as intergovernmental bargaining sessions where the member states fight over secondary rules to implement EU legislation (Steunenberg et al, 1996(Steunenberg et al, , 1997Franchino, 2000b;Ballman et al, 2002;Pollack, 2003a, pp. 114-46).…”

“…According to this image, comitology is a technocratic version of deliberative democracy in which informal norms, deliberation and good arguments matter more than economic interests and formal voting rules. The second imagedrawn from rational choice theory and associated with authors such as Steunenberg et al (1996Steunenberg et al ( , 1997, Pollack (2003a, pp. 114-46), Ballman et al (2002) and Franchino (2000a) -portrays comitology committees as miniature versions of the Council.…”