Policymaking, comitology, and the balance of power in the European Union

Steunenberg, Bernard; Koboldt, Christian; Schmidtchen, Dieter

doi:10.1016/0144-8188(96)00026-9

Cited by 79 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…30 Blom-Hansen 2011. See also Bergstro¨m 2005;Steunenberg, Koboldt, and Schmidtchen 1996. distribution between the legislature and the bureaucratic agent, but also a normative perspective on the legitimacy of the legislative output. Until now, little has been discovered about the shift from secondary to tertiary acts, because the existing literature on EU legislation has excluded tertiary acts from its sampling.…”

Section: Co-decision and Qmv Core Size = 064mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legislative Gridlock and Bureaucratic Politics in the European Union

Junge¹,

König²,

Luig³

2014

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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How does the risk of gridlock affect the type of legislative output? Do bureaucratic agents expand their activities when they can expect that the principals are unable to overrule them? This article introduces a novel approach for calculating the risk of gridlock in bicameral legislatures in order to estimate its impact on bureaucratic activities, combining data on all secondary and tertiary acts of the European Union (EU) from 1983 to 2009. The findings reveal that bureaucratic activities expand when the risk of gridlock increases and an overruling of tertiary acts becomes less likely. This may sustain the EU's overall decision-making productivity, but its bureaucratic nature may raise further questions about democratic legitimacy and principal-agent problems in the representation of interests.Legislative scholars have intensely studied the power distribution within legislatures and the factors that promote gridlock. 1 Some scholars have argued that gridlock can improve the quality of legislative output, 2 but a common view in legislative research is that gridlock reduces the likelihood of policy change. 3 Drawing on theories of veto players, 4 party cartels, 5 presidential approval, 6 coalition governments, 7 unified or divided government, 8 and ideological conflict in parliaments, 9 the empirical research mainly supports the effect of this risk on the scale and scope of adopted legislative acts. 10 But how does the risk of gridlock affect the power of the bureaucracy and the type of legislative output? We argue that the risk of gridlock may also change the distribution of

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Section: Co-decision and Qmv Core Size = 064mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legislative Gridlock and Bureaucratic Politics in the European Union

Junge¹,

König²,

Luig³

2014

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“…The accepted view is that, among the pre-Lisbon procedures, the regulatory procedure is more restrictive than the management procedure, which again is more restrictive than the advisory procedure. This hierarchical ordering has been confirmed by game theoretical analyses of the procedures (Steunenberg et al, 1996(Steunenberg et al, , 1997Ballman et al, 2002). After the Lisbon Treaty the regulatory and management procedures have been merged into a new so-called examination procedure, while the advisory procedure is unchanged.…”

Section: The Comitology System In Practice: Bargaining or Deliberation?mentioning

confidence: 81%

“…The exact nature of the various comitology procedures has changed over time, but until the Lisbon Treaty they were always referred to as the advisory, management, regulatory and safeguard procedures, and they constrained the Commission to varying degrees. As game theoretic analyses confirm, the safeguard procedure was the strictest, the regulatory procedure was stricter than the management procedure, which again was stricter than the advisory procedure (Steunenberg et al, 1996(Steunenberg et al, , 1997Ballman et al, 2002). Following the Lisbon Treaty, a compromise has been reached that the four comitology procedures are simplified into two new procedures: an advisory procedure that is identical to the previous advisory procedure and a new examination procedure.…”

Section: The Institutional Set-up Of Comitologymentioning

confidence: 91%

“…According to this image, comitology is a technocratic version of deliberative democracy in which informal norms, deliberation and good arguments matter more than economic interests and formal voting rules. The second imagedrawn from rational choice theory and associated with authors such as Steunenberg et al (1996Steunenberg et al ( , 1997, Pollack (2003a, pp. 114-46), Ballman et al (2002) and Franchino (2000a) -portrays comitology committees as miniature versions of the Council.…”

Section: The Comitology System In Practice: Bargaining or Deliberation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The EU Comitology System in Theory and Practice

Blom‐Hansen¹

2011

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“…Our focus is on the division of power between the Union's main decision making bodies based on the structure of legislative decision making procedures. Modeling the interactions between these institutions as a sequential game, Steunenberg, Koboldt and Schmidtchen (1995) first studied the interbody division of power in the Union, based on the general approach developed in Steunenberg (1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Power in the European Union

Steunenberg¹,

Schmidtchen²,

Koboldt³

1999

Journal of Theoretical Politics

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124

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Abstract. In this paper we propose a new method to evaluate the distribution of power between decision making bodies in the European Union. Conventional methods that measure the voting power of players, such as the Banzhaf, Johnston, Holler, and Shapley-Shubik indices, are insufficient for this purpose. They take no account, in an endogenous way, of the differences in the abilities of players to affect the outcome of decision making, which are a result of the existence of political institutions. We propose a different way to measure decision making power based on the distance between a player's ideal point and the equilibrium outcome of a game. While all previous indices are based on cooperative game theory, the index developed this paper is based on non-cooperative game theory, which has been the dominant thrust of theoretical politics and economics in the last years. The new index is applied to legislative procedures in the European Union.keywords: strategic power index, voting power indices, non-cooperative game theory, political institutions, European Union

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Policymaking, comitology, and the balance of power in the European Union

Cited by 79 publications

References 3 publications

Legislative Gridlock and Bureaucratic Politics in the European Union

Legislative Gridlock and Bureaucratic Politics in the European Union

The EU Comitology System in Theory and Practice

Strategic Power in the European Union

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