Opening the Black Box: Decision-Making in the Committee of the Regions

New Members in Old Institutions: The Impact of Enlargement on the Committee of the Regions

“…This could be a danger for consolidated consensual decision making in the CoR, which was established during several sessions before the 2004 enlargement (Hönnige and Kaiser, 2003). In contrast, Scherpereel (2005: 27) wrote that "the enlargement is unlikely to upset the CoR's developmental course or to bury [it] in internal organizational chaos".…”

“…Within the commissions, political groups decide the allocations of opinions and organize their discussion. Hönnige and Kaiser (2003) suggested that competition between political groups and national delegations is a zero-sum game. In fact, they compete for influence and are often more important than the national delegations, not only in the agenda-setting phase.…”

“…As far as the internal dimension of the CoR is concerned, the efforts of scholars have rarely gone beyond the description of its composition and administrative structure. Knowledge about this latter component of the CoR's activity is limited to an overview of potential cleavages existing in the Committee (Christiansen, 1995) and their impact on voting behaviour of CoR members (Hönnige and Kaiser, 2003). So, the necessity to learn more about what happens in one of the 'black boxes' of EU institutions persists.…”

New Multi-Level Governance in the EU?

“…Yet some thought the diversity of members' institutional roles, representing local, provincial or regional authorities at either legislative or executive levels according to each EU member state's preferences, would be a potentially debilitating weakness rather than a strength (Christiansen 1996). Based on the initially narrow set of policy areas for which the CoR was given the right of 'mandatory consultation', and the widely diverging degrees of competence in these policy fields between different sub-national levels in different member states, it was presumed that the CoR could only ever provide lowest-common denominator suggestions that it would be all too easy for the other EU institutions to ignore (Hönnige/Kaiser 2003). Moreover, in view of the duality of its organisation into national delegations and political groups (Pazos-Vidal 2019), the CoR's weak institutional basis as an offshoot of the European Economic and Social Committee, and the EU's absorption with larger issues, notably enlargement and subsequent treaty changes, it seemed unlikely that the Committee would be able to exert significant influence.…”