IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/erp/eiopxx/p0039.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Delegation, Agency and Agenda Setting in the Treaty of Amsterdam

Author

Listed:
  • Pollack, Mark A.

Abstract

This paper applies a principal-agent model of delegation, agency and agenda setting to the 1996 intergovernmental conference and the Treaty of Amsterdam, in order to understand both the delegation of powers to supranational organizations in the new Treaty, and the efforts of such organizations to set the agenda for the conference. At Amsterdam, the member governments of the European Union delegated new powers to the Commission, the Court of Justice, and especially the European Parliament; these new powers, however, are carefully hedged with elaborate mechanisms to control, if not eliminate, supranational autonomy in the future. In the intergovernmental conference, moreover, the EUs supranational organizations attempted to influence the outcome of the negotiations as informal agenda setters, but they were limited in their ability to do so by the information-rich content of the IGC. However, while the influence of the Commission, Court and Parliament was indeed limited in the intergovernmental conference and at Amsterdam, we should beware of generalizing from IGCs to the day-to-day workings of EU politics, where the powers of the supranational organizations are far greater than in any intergovernmental conference.

Suggested Citation

  • Pollack, Mark A., 1999. "Delegation, Agency and Agenda Setting in the Treaty of Amsterdam," European Integration online Papers (EIoP), European Community Studies Association Austria (ECSA-A), vol. 3, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:erp:eiopxx:p0039
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/1999-006a.htm
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/1999-006.htm
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://eiop.or.at/eiop/pdf/1999-006.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tsebelis, George, 1994. "The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 88(1), pages 128-142, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thomas Konig & Jonathan Slapin, 2004. "Bringing Parliaments Back in," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 16(3), pages 357-394, July.
    2. Henry Farrell & Adrienne Héritier, 2006. "Codecision and Institutional Change," EUI-RSCAS Working Papers 41, European University Institute (EUI), Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies (RSCAS).
    3. Stephan Stetter, 2004. "Torn between Reform and Stagnation: An Institutionalist Analysis of the MEDA Programme," EUI-RSCAS Working Papers 43, European University Institute (EUI), Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies (RSCAS).
    4. Berthold Rittberger, 2003. "Removing conceptual blinders: Under what conditions does the ‘democratic deficit’ affect institutional design decisions?," The Constitutionalism Web-Papers p0023, University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science.
    5. Jens Steffek, 2008. "Public Accountability and the Public Sphere of International Governance," RECON Online Working Papers Series 3, RECON.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mika Widgrén, 2008. "The Impact of Council's Internal Decision-Making Rules on the Future EU," Discussion Papers 26, Aboa Centre for Economics.
    2. Michal Ovádek, 2021. "Procedural Politics Revisited: Institutional Incentives and Jurisdictional Ambiguity in EU Competence Disputes," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(6), pages 1381-1399, November.
    3. Abdul Ghafar Noury & Gérard Roland, 2002. "More power to the European Parliament?," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/7760, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    4. Robert Inman & Daniel Rubinfeld, 2002. "Subsidiarity, governance, and EU economic policy," CESifo Forum, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 3(04), pages 3-11, October.
    5. Le Breton, Michel & Montero, Maria & Zaporozhets, Vera, 2012. "Voting power in the EU council of ministers and fair decision making in distributive politics," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 159-173.
    6. Thomas König & Daniel Finke, 2007. "Reforming the equilibrium? Veto players and policy change in the European constitution-building process," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 2(2), pages 153-176, June.
    7. Stefan Napel & Mika Widgrén, 2011. "Strategic versus non-strategic voting power in the EU Council of Ministers: the consultation procedure," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 37(3), pages 511-541, September.
    8. Cesar Garcia Perez de Leon, 2012. "Does implicit voting matter? Coalitional bargaining in the EU legislative process," European Union Politics, , vol. 13(4), pages 513-534, December.
    9. Thomas König & Mirja Pöter, 2001. "Examining the EU Legislative Process," European Union Politics, , vol. 2(3), pages 329-351, October.
    10. Goerke, Laszlo & Piazolo, Kathrin, 1998. "Decision making under the EU's Social Chapter," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 217-237, June.
    11. James P. Cross, 2012. "Interventions and negotiation in the Council of Ministers of the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 13(1), pages 47-69, March.
    12. Christophe Crombez & Simon Hix, 2011. "Treaty reform and the Commission’s appointment and policy-making role in the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 12(3), pages 291-314, September.
    13. Johan F.M. Swinnen, 2008. "The Political Economy of the 2003 Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy," LICOS Discussion Papers 21508, LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven.
    14. Brian Efird & Gaspare M. Genna, 2002. "Structural Conditions and the Propensity for Regional Integration," European Union Politics, , vol. 3(3), pages 267-295, September.
    15. Justin Leinaweaver & Robert Thomson, 2014. "Testing models of legislative decision-making with measurement error: The robust predictive power of bargaining models over procedural models," European Union Politics, , vol. 15(1), pages 43-58, March.
    16. Torsten J. Selck, 2004. "On the Dimensionality of European Union Legislative Decision-Making," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 16(2), pages 203-222, April.
    17. Thomas König & Thomas Bräuninger, 1996. "Power and Political Coordination in American and German Multi-Chamber Legislation," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 8(3), pages 331-360, July.
    18. Schnapp, Kai-Uwe, 2000. "Ministerial bureaucracies as stand-in agenda setters? A comparative description," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Institutions and Social Change FS III 00-204, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    19. Jonathan B Slapin, 2014. "Measurement, model testing, and legislative influence in the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 15(1), pages 24-42, March.
    20. König, Thomas & Bräuninger, Thomas, 1997. "Decisiveness and Inclusiveness: Intergovernmental Choice of European Decision Rules," European Integration online Papers (EIoP), European Community Studies Association Austria (ECSA-A), vol. 1, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:erp:eiopxx:p0039. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Editorial Assistant (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecsaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.