The Inter-Institutional Distribution of Power in EU Codecision

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayIn contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act strategically. Predicted bargaining outcomes of the crucial Conciliation stage of codecision are shown to be strongly biased towards the legislative status quo. Making symmetric preference assumptions for members of CM and EP, CM is on average much more conservative because of its internal qualified majority rule. This makes CM by an order of magnitude more influential than EP, in contrast to a seeming formal parity between the two 'co-legislators'.JEL Code: C70, C78, D70, D72.

The Impact of Council Voting Rules on EU Decision-Making

“…Under the former the relative losses are almost constant with an exception of EP that loses the most. This is another way to express the result of Napel and Widgrén (2006): higher quota clearly benefits CM when strategic aspects and the possibility of status quo bias are considered.…”

“…In recent years EP has gained some power but despite the recent claims that the expanding use of the co-decision procedure has significantly increased EP's power at the expense of CM's power (e.g. Tsebelis and Garrett (2000)) it is still far less powerful than CM (Napel and Widgrén (2006)). …”

“…Here, the first attempt is Steunenberg, Schmidtchen, and Koboldt (1999) who define power as the expected utility (using spatial preferences) that an actor obtains in the procedure when preferences are randomised. A more recent attempt is based on the strategic measure of power (SMP) that was introduced in Napel and Widgrén (2004) and applied in inter-institutional analysis of EU codecision in Napel and Widgrén (2006). The latter is based on an equilibrium analysis of procedural spatial voting games.…”

“…If CM and EP agree on a compromise, it is submitted to CM and EP for acceptance in a third reading in which CM and EP use their typical qualified and simple majority rules, respectively. In this paper, we adopt extensive form game model Napel and Widgrén (2006) for the procedure (see figure 1). The bargaining outcome that EP, CM, and also the EC expect to result from invoking the Conciliation Committee plays a crucial role at earlier stages of the procedure.…”

Vote Probabilities, Thresholds and Actor Preferences: Decision Capacity and the Council of the European Union

“…Defined as the ratio of the number of winning coalitions to the total number of all conceivable coalitions, the Coleman measure equals the probability of a decision in favor of a change in the status quo, provided that all coalitions are equally probable. 2 This assumption is equivalent to the binomial model of voting in which each vote has an equal probability of being for or against 1 See, for example, Tsebelis (1994Tsebelis ( , 1995, Steunenberg (1994), Crombez (1996), Tsebelis (1996, 1999), Moser (1996Moser ( , 1997, Laruelle (1997), Hubschmid and Moser (1997), Thomson and Hosli (2006), and Napel and Widgrén (2006). 2 By 'coalition' we mean the set of members voting affirmatively, i.e.…”