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

Abstract

Most EU legislation consists of executive acts of the European Commission. The Lisbon Treaty introduced a new type of EU executive legislation – delegated acts, which give the European Parliament formal powers of legislative scrutiny equal to those of the EU Council. Thus, the use of delegated acts could reinforce the institutional balance of power and help reduce the EU's democratic deficit. We studied the situations when the Parliament and the Council agreed to grant the Commission the right to adopt delegated acts, considering the preference constellations of legislative and executive actors and legislative complexity. Using a novel dataset on post‐Lisbon legislation, we found that delegated acts are more likely in cases of high legislative complexity and when the Council sees the Parliament as an ally vis‐à‐vis the Commission. However, the European Parliament gets no say over executive measures when doing so could shift policy outcomes away from the Council's preferences, raising doubts about the effectiveness of parliamentary control.

Comitology and Delegation System in the European Union

“…Это вынуждена делать и Комиссия, поэтому существует риск, что в делегированных актах Комиссия отразит предпочтения ЕП, противоречащие интересам государств-членов. Связанное с этим снижение возможности государств-членов контролировать действия Комиссии вызывает, по экспертным оценкам, особую озабоченность Совета при выборе процедуры делегирования [Yordanova & Zhelyazkova, 2020].…”

“…За период 2010-2016 гг. было принято 585 актов вторичного законодательства; 42% из них дали Комиссии право принимать делегированные акты [Yordanova & Zhelyazkova, 2020]. Возникает вопрос, при каких условиях Совет и Европарламент, имея диаметрально противоположные интересы, соглашаются осуществлять контроль над Комиссией посредством делегированных актов?…”

“…Гийс Ян Брандсма и Йенс Блум-Хансен исследовали вопрос выбора делегированных актов в более широком контексте выбора различных форм контроля над Комиссий [Brandsma & Blom-Hansen, 2016]. Николетта Йорданова и Ася Желязкова сосредоточились именно на факторах, определяющих выбор законодателями делегированных актов как формы контроля [Yordanova & Zhelyazkova, 2020]. В своей работе они использовали итоговые тексты законодательных актов, принятых с 1 декабря 2009 г. до конца 2016 г.…”

What Makes Policy Complex?

“…While this argument appears intuitive, it comes with the implicit assumption that each recital carries the same (or at least a similar) level of information. 5 Whether or not this assumption is true is difficult preparatory documents, the number of major provisions, and the number of articles (Franchino, 2004(Franchino, , 2007Steunenberg and Kaeding, 2009;Brandsma and Blom-Hansen, 2017;Yordanova and Zhelyazkova, 2020). 5 For example, the assumption is made explicit in Kaeding (2006)'s interpretation that a unit increase in the number of recitals changes the probability of a delayed transposition process by a certain percentage point.…”

“…First, my definition can be seen as an integration of existing ways to describe complex policies. While some argue that policy complexity depends on the length and detail of a policy (Ehrlich, 2011;Thomson and Torenvlied, 2011;Yordanova and Zhelyazkova, 2020), others say that complex policies are the result of the increasing number of relations between policies (Krehbiel, 1991;Hurka and Haag, 2019;Adam et al, 2019). The two approaches consider reasonable but different aspects of complex polices.…”