How Time Affects EU Decision-Making

Abstract

International audienc

Analysing the Process of EU Legislative Decision-Making

“…Most recently, repeated this analysis on the 1669 directives, now agreeing with our original conclusion that there is a 'trade-off between efficiency and democratic inclusiveness'. The latest version by Golub and Steunenberg (2007) re-analyses these results and contradicts the previous findings on QMV after the Single European Act (SEA), QMV post Maastricht, co-decision and cooperation after Maastricht, and the Thatcher and backlog effects. Independently of this confusion, the conclusions on enlargement and Thatcher effects remain speculative, as the following analysis will show, owing to the lack of estimators for preferences.…”

“…However, whether the change in EU legislative decision-making in 1990 resulted from the change in the UK government, from German unification or from any other event cannot be satisfactorily answered by such a research design. A major drawback of using only control variables can be identified in Golub and Steunenberg (2007), showing that the institutional variables themselves are the object of change over time. In other words, why should the application of QMV have a different impact on EU decision-making process before and after 1990?…”

“…Instead of concentrating on statistical error when using time-dependent variables, it is more advisable to provide a theoretical foundation (Zorn, 2007: 573). I will exemplify this by showing that the UK position does not reveal the 'Fontainebleau effect' suggested by Golub and Steunenberg (2007), and the inclusion of member state preferences may explain the curious findings on the effects of institutional variables, which change over time.…”

Stability and change in international policy-making: A punctuated equilibrium approach

“…With every new treaty since then (Maastricht Treaty 1993, Amsterdam Treaty 1999, Nice Treaty 2003, and Lisbon Treaty 2009, the EU brought more policy domains into the remit of qualified majority voting, making that the standard principle of present-day decision-making. Research demonstrates that this change in the decision rule had a clear positive effect on decision-making efficiency in the EU (Golub 1999;Schulz and König 2000;Golub and Steunenberg 2007). However, during the same time period, the EU's membership more than tripled, from 9 in 1980 to 28 in 2013.…”

“…While the third component of institutional friction, preference heterogeneity, remained relatively constant, a development exogenous to our measure of institutional friction -the growing involvement of the European Parliament in EU policy-makingis known to have affected decision-making capacity in a negative direction as well (Golub 1999;Golub and Steunenberg 2007;Schulz and König 2000). We use the Maastricht Treaty as cut-off point in Table 5, but given the gradual nature of these changes, we also repeated the analysis with the other treaties as cut-off points.…”