The European Parliament and the Investiture of the Commission - A first-mover in European Integration?

In numerous areas of European Union (EU) policy-making, the European Parliament (EP) managed to expand its informal institutional rights through the use of bargaining strategies. We put forward a crucial, but largely overlooked bargaining strategy that the EP uses for its self-empowerment: By “moving first†, the EP unilaterally interprets its formal powers by inventing a new informal institutional rule, which it then tries to impose on other actors. We propose that this strategy is successful when it incurs high costs for other actors to return to the status quo ante. In this article, we conceptualize the first mover strategy, embed it in the literature on informal institutional change in the EU, and theoretically deduce the conditions under which the EP gains institutional rights when applying it. Empirically, we demonstrate the significance of moving first in the investiture of the European Commission in five case studies, including the strategy’s failure in the 2019 appointment of Ursula von der Leyen as a negative case study. We thus trace how the EP was able to achieve a considerable institutional empowerment in appointing the executive – starting from a mere right of censure in 1957 to ‘electing’ the European Commission President in 2014 – by making use of a first-mover strategy. In 2019, however, the EP failed with its first-mover strategy due to countervailing dynamics of distributive consequences, timing and a lack of internal consensus.