Institutional Constraints, Legislative Activism, and Policy Change: The Case of the European Union.

Abstract

This paper studies how institutional constraints affect legislative activism, and how legislative activism in turn affects policy change, analysing the case of the European Union's legislative process. Our argument revolves around the key role of the European Commission in advancing policy change, and emphasises that the Commission can successfully push for increased policy change by increasing its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space widens. Using a novel panel dataset covering eight policy sectors from 1984-2012, we find that the number of legislative proposals significantly affects the extent of regulatory reform in the EU. The rise in the number of legislative proposal, in turn, is affected by the extent of gridlock between the EU's legislative bodies. These findings show that the Commission steps up its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space allows for greater policy change.

Redistribution in a political union: The case of the EU

“…The third component of our model tests whether the national governments’ ideological positioning on the left/right scale and on the pro‐/anti‐EU dimension has any impact on the redistribution of common fiscal resources. Although some extensive empirical studies have analyzed how political partisanship influences decision‐making in the Council (Hagemann & Hoyland 2008) and how it affects EU regulatory policies (Citi & Justesen 2014, 2016) and the reform of the EU budget (Citi 2015), there is little empirical evidence and theoretical elaboration on how political partisanship may affect transnational redistribution in the EU. In the absence of clear theoretical priors about the impact of the governments’ ideological position on the budget, we conjecture that trans‐national redistribution has different levels of salience in national parties, and that parties representing constituencies that benefit the most from transnational redistribution will place higher demands on the EU budget.…”