The Effect of Removing Voting Rules: Consultation Practices in the Commission's Delegated Act Expert Groups and Comitology Committees

Abstract

The Lisbon Treaty changed the system of delegating executive powers to the European Commission: it introduced the delegated acts system as an alternative to comitology, which continues to exist in parallel. This new system allocates veto power to the European Parliament and the Council, in which Member State expert groups are consulted without having a formal vote. The Council fears that the absence of formal voting will tempt the Commission to ignore Member State input in the expert groups. This article investigates to what degree this fear is justified. To what degree do formal voting rights affect the consultation of Member State experts? On the basis of interviews with Member State experts who participate both in expert groups as well as in comitology committees, we demonstrate how consultation patterns differ between the two settings.

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

“…The high voting thresholds lead some scholars to contend that member states lose influence under the delegated acts system (Kaeding and Stack, 2015). In line with these arguments, Siderius and Brandsma (2016) expected and found that the Commission is more prone to accommodate member states' preferences when drafting implementing acts than in the preparation of delegated acts. Consequently, recent studies have argued and shown that the Council generally supports control over the Commission through implementing acts (Brandsma and Blom-Hansen, 2016;Christiansen and Dobbels, 2013a), in the adoption of which member states normally enjoy both veto and de facto amendment powers.…”

“…From the perspective of the Council, higher levels of information intensity do not create clear incentives to control the Commission activities in subsequent stages of policy‐making. While implementing measures formally envision specialized input from member states' committees, national experts are still consulted and informally participate in the design of delegated acts (Brandsma and Blom‐Hansen, ; Hardacre and Kaeding, ; Siderius and Brandsma, ). This is especially the case for complex issues, for which the Commission needs additional expertise and is more likely to seek input from national experts.…”

“…Higher levels of information intensity imply that secondary legislation covers numerous different policy issues, which increases the likelihood that at least some of these issues are politically relevant to the Parliament. Recent studies show that both formal and informal consultations in member states' committees and expert groups deal with politically salient issues rather than technical details (Siderius and Brandsma, ). Under these circumstances, the Parliament will be reluctant to relinquish legislative control.…”

Comitology: the strength of dissent

“…The 2011 comitology reform stimulated new reflections about the institutional scope and practice of comitology (Bergström and Ritleng 2016;Brandsma 2013;Blom-Hansen 2012 andSiderius and Brandsma 2016).The objective of this article is to contribute to this debate by bringing new empirical data on the member states' behaviour regarding the Commission's action in the executive domain before and after the most recent comitology reform. A previous study on the frequency of member states' dissensus with the Commission's regulatory measures in comitology committees in 2008 showed that conflicts, i.e.…”

“…Recent studies on member states' behaviour have underlined that the level of individual negotiation participants has an influence on interactions and negotiation results in EU institutions (Panke 2016). Other specific qualitative studies on comitology have demonstrated that the way comitology committees internally operate is a combination of 'integrative bargaining and technical debate' (Siderius and Brandsma 2016). Arguably, an exhaustive analysis of the composition of committees, unveiling its multiple variations would help to refine these findings.…”