IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/eeupol/v9y2008i4p459-486.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Legislative Bargaining in the European Union

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Schure

    (University of Victoria, Canada, schure@uvic.ca)

  • Amy Verdun

    (University of Victoria, Canada, averdun@uvic.ca)

Abstract

We analyse legislative bargaining in the European Union. In our model, EU member states bargain over the policy choices underlying legislation and over its `template': (1) the degree of discretion at the application stage, and (2) whether the discretionary power is delegated to the Commission (or retained by the Council). Our analysis classifies member states into `large', `medium-sized' and `small' based on their voting power in the Council. Large member states seek to adopt open-ended legislation in which the Council retains the discretionary power. Medium-sized ones prefer `clear rules' without discretion. Small member states prefer open-ended legislation in which discretion is delegated to the Commission. We discuss the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) as an illustrative example.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Schure & Amy Verdun, 2008. "Legislative Bargaining in the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 9(4), pages 459-486, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:9:y:2008:i:4:p:459-486
    DOI: 10.1177/1465116508095146
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116508095146
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/1465116508095146?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Clifford J. Carrubba & Craig Volden, 2001. "Explaining Institutional Change in the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 2(1), pages 5-30, February.
    2. Christina Zimmer & Gerald Schneider & Michael Dobbins, 2005. "The Contested Council: Conflict Dimensions of an Intergovernmental EU Institution," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 53, pages 403-422, June.
    3. Giandomenico Majone, 2001. "Two Logics of Delegation," European Union Politics, , vol. 2(1), pages 103-122, February.
    4. Martin Heipertz & Amy Verdun, 2005. "The Stability and Growth Pact ‐ Theorizing a Case in European Integration," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(5), pages 985-1008, December.
    5. Philippe Aghion & Alberto Alesina & Francesco Trebbi, 2004. "Endogenous Political Institutions," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(2), pages 565-611.
    6. Dal Bo, Ernesto, 2006. "Committees with supermajority voting yield commitment with flexibility," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(4-5), pages 573-599, May.
    7. Paul Schure & Francesco Passerelli & David Scoones, 2007. "When the Powerful Drag Their Feet," Department Discussion Papers 0703, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.
    8. Putnam, Robert D., 1988. "Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 42(3), pages 427-460, July.
    9. Simon Hix, 2001. "Legislative Behaviour and Party Competition in the European Parliament: An Application of Nominate to the EU," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(4), pages 663-688, November.
    10. Benoit, Jean-Pierre & Kornhauser, Lewis A., 2002. "Game-theoretic analysis of legal rules and institutions," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, in: R.J. Aumann & S. Hart (ed.), Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 60, pages 2229-2269, Elsevier.
    11. Hart, Oliver D & Moore, John, 1988. "Incomplete Contracts and Renegotiation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(4), pages 755-785, July.
    12. Torsten Persson, 2002. "Do Political Institutions Shape Economic Policy?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(3), pages 883-905, May.
    13. Dan S. Felsenthal & Moshé Machover, 1998. "The Measurement of Voting Power," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1489.
    14. Pradeep Dubey & Lloyd S. Shapley, 1979. "Mathematical Properties of the Banzhaf Power Index," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 4(2), pages 99-131, May.
    15. Hart, Oliver, 1995. "Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198288817.
    16. Shapley, L. S. & Shubik, Martin, 1954. "A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 48(3), pages 787-792, September.
    17. Golub, Jonathan, 1999. "In the Shadow of the Vote? Decision Making in the European Community," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 53(4), pages 733-764, October.
    18. Marco Buti & Lucio R. Pench, 2004. "Why Do Large Countries Flout the Stability Pact? And What Can Be Done About It?," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(5), pages 1025-1032, December.
    19. Christina Zimmer & Gerald Schneider & Michael Dobbins, 2005. "The Contested Council: Conflict Dimensions of an Intergovernmental EU Institution," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 53(2), pages 403-422, June.
    20. Hix, Simon, 2002. "Constitutional Agenda-Setting Through Discretion in Rule Interpretation: Why the European Parliament Won at Amsterdam," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 32(2), pages 259-280, April.
    21. Pollack, Mark A., 1997. "Delegation, agency, and agenda setting in the European Community," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 51(1), pages 99-134, January.
    22. Leech, Dennis, 2002. "Designing the Voting System for the Council of the European Union," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 113(3-4), pages 437-464, December.
    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. Dirk Leuffen & Thomas Malang & Sebastian Wörle, 2014. "Structure, Capacity or Power? Explaining Salience in EU Decision-Making," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 52(3), pages 616-631, May.
    2. Mišík, Matúš, 2016. "On the way towards the Energy Union: Position of Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia towards external energy security integration," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 68-81.
    3. Fabio Franchino & Camilla Mariotto, 2021. "Noncompliance risk, asymmetric power and the design of enforcement of the European economic governance," European Union Politics, , vol. 22(4), pages 591-610, December.
    4. Biesenbender, Jan, 2011. "The Dynamics of Treaty Change – Measuring the Distribution of Power in the European Union," European Integration online Papers (EIoP), European Community Studies Association Austria (ECSA-A), vol. 15, October.
    5. Manuela Moschella, 2014. "Monitoring Macroeconomic Imbalances: Is EU Surveillance More Effective than IMF Surveillance?," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 52(6), pages 1273-1289, November.
    6. Paul Schure & Francesco Passerelli & David Scoones, 2007. "When the Powerful Drag Their Feet," Department Discussion Papers 0703, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.

    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. Attanasi, Giuseppe & Corazzini, Luca & Passarelli, Francesco, 2017. "Voting as a lottery," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 129-137.
    2. Paul Schure & Francesco Passerelli & David Scoones, 2007. "When the Powerful Drag Their Feet," Department Discussion Papers 0703, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.
    3. Annick Laruelle & Ricardo Martınez & Federico Valenciano, 2006. "Success Versus Decisiveness," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 18(2), pages 185-205, April.
    4. Le Breton, Michel & Lepelley, Dominique & Macé, Antonin & Merlin, Vincent, 2017. "Le mécanisme optimal de vote au sein du conseil des représentants d’un système fédéral," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 93(1-2), pages 203-248, Mars-Juin.
    5. Houy, Nicolas & Zwicker, William S., 2014. "The geometry of voting power: Weighted voting and hyper-ellipsoids," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 7-16.
    6. Frank M. Häge, 2007. "Committee Decision-making in the Council of the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 8(3), pages 299-328, September.
    7. Di Giannatale, Paolo & Passarelli, Francesco, 2013. "Voting chances instead of voting weights," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 65(3), pages 164-173.
    8. Boratyn, Daria & Kirsch, Werner & Słomczyński, Wojciech & Stolicki, Dariusz & Życzkowski, Karol, 2020. "Average weights and power in weighted voting games," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 90-99.
    9. Federico Valenciano & Annick Laruelle & Ricardo Martínez, 2004. "Success Versus Decisiveness: Conceptual Discussion And Case Study," Working Papers. Serie AD 2004-30, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie).
    10. Bhattacherjee, Sanjay & Sarkar, Palash, 2017. "Correlation and inequality in weighted majority voting games," MPRA Paper 83168, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Barua, Rana & Chakravarty, Satya R. & Roy, Sonali, 2006. "On the Coleman indices of voting power," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 171(1), pages 273-289, May.
    12. Manuele Citi & Mads Dagnis Jensen, 2022. "The Effects of Supranational Delegation on Policy Development," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(2), pages 337-354, March.
    13. Josep Freixas & Sascha Kurz, 2014. "Enumeration of weighted games with minimum and an analysis of voting power for bipartite complete games with minimum," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 222(1), pages 317-339, November.
    14. Christophe Crombez & Pieterjan Vangerven, 2014. "Procedural models of European Union politics: Contributions and suggestions for improvement," European Union Politics, , vol. 15(2), pages 289-308, June.
    15. Sascha Kurz & Stefan Napel, 2014. "Heuristic and exact solutions to the inverse power index problem for small voting bodies," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 215(1), pages 137-163, April.
    16. Barua, Rana & Chakravarty, Satya R. & Sarkar, Palash, 2009. "Minimal-axiom characterizations of the Coleman and Banzhaf indices of voting power," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 58(3), pages 367-375, November.
    17. Deniz Aksoy, 2010. "Who gets what, when, and how revisited: Voting and proposal powers in the allocation of the EU budget," European Union Politics, , vol. 11(2), pages 171-194, June.
    18. Salvador Barbera & Matthew O. Jackson, 2006. "On the Weights of Nations: Assigning Voting Weights in a Heterogeneous Union," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 114(2), pages 317-339, April.
    19. F. Barthélémy & M. Martin, 2005. "Répartition des sièges au sein des structures intercommunales du Val d’Oise," THEMA Working Papers 2005-16, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    20. Gerald Schneider & Daniel Finke & Stefanie Bailer, 2010. "Bargaining Power in the European Union: An Evaluation of Competing Game‐Theoretic Models," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 58(1), pages 85-103, February.

    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:sae:eeupol:v:9:y:2008:i:4:p:459-486. 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: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    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.