Controlling delegated powers in the post-Lisbon European Union

Abstract

Most EU rules are made by the Commission, not the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament. But although the Commission is an important rule-maker, it is not autonomous. The member states have always taken care to install committees to control the Commission ('comitology'). However, the Lisbon Treaty introduced alternative control mechanisms (delegated acts) and a reform of the comitology system (implementing acts). This article investigates how the post-Lisbon control system works in daily legislative practice. It represents the first investigation of the institutional preferences of the Council, the Parliament and the Commission in the new system. Further, it utilizes better data than previous studies. The analysis is based on data on the control preferences of all actors before the first trilogue meeting for a large number of cases in the period 2010-2013. The results indicate that the institutional battle over the control of delegated rulemaking is far from over.

Legislative Control over Executive Law‐making: Delegation of Quasi‐legislative Powers to the European Commission

“…Therefore, we assumed that Parliament generally prefers granting powers to the Commission to adopt delegated acts. In this way, the EP can retain control over subsequent stages of policy-making to avoid policy drift (Brandsma and Blom-Hansen, 2016).…”

“…This is an important question because it has substantive implications for the institutional balance of power. Indeed, scholars generally agree that the provision for delegated acts is a contested political matter rather than a purely technical question (Bergström and Ritleng, ; Brandsma and Blom‐Hansen, , ; Christiansen and Dobbels, , ).…”

The Effect of Removing Voting Rules: Consultation Practices in the Commission's Delegated Act Expert Groups and Comitology Committees

“…The second category, dubbed ‘implementing acts’, consists of executive acts that provide uniform conditions for Member State administrations to implement EU law. Arguably this distinction is not phrased in mutually exclusive terms, so that the definitions are in part overlapping – a problem that creates significant legal and political uncertainty when choices between applying either of the two regimes need to be made (Christiansen and Dobbels, ; Craig, ; Brandsma and Blom‐Hansen, ; Voermans et al , ).…”

“…Recent contributions on comitology and the delegated act system have typically employed a rational choice institutionalist perspective that assumes institutional actors aim to maximize their power in a control system (e.g. Brandsma and Blom‐Hansen, ; Héritier et al , ). These studies have in common that they focus on the development of the institutional rules that govern the comitology and delegated acts systems, and on the selection of control systems by legislative actors.…”

“…This is also the case in the EU system, where the EP (European Parliament) and the Council extensively delegate rule‐making powers to the European Commission. In fact, most EU legal acts are executive acts: over the past years the Commission published between 2,000 and 3,500 executive acts in the Official Journal per year, while the number of legislative acts adopted through the ordinary legislative procedure has been around the 100 mark (Brandsma and Blom‐Hansen, ).…”