Decision-Making in the European Union before and ...

West European Politics

ISSN: 0140-2382 (Print) 1743-9655 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fwep20

Introduction: Decision-Making in the European Union before and after the Lisbon Treaty Madeleine Hosli , Amie Kreppel , Běla Plechanovová & Amy Verdun To cite this article: Madeleine Hosli , Amie Kreppel , Běla Plechanovová & Amy Verdun (2013) Introduction: Decision-Making in the European Union before and after the Lisbon Treaty, West European Politics, 36:6, 1121-1127, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2013.826020 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2013.826020

Published online: 08 Oct 2013.

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West European Politics, 2013 Vol. 36, No. 6, 1121–1127, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2013.826020

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Introduction: Decision-Making in the European Union before and after the Lisbon Treaty MADELEINE HOSLI, AMIE KREPPEL, BĚLA PLECHANOVOVÁ and AMY VERDUN The Lisbon Treaty (2007) entered into force on 1 December 2009. It foresaw a number of changes in institutional relations and decision-making between the European Union (EU) institutions on the one hand and between the EU and its member states on the other. This special issue of West European Politics (WEP) focuses on decisionmaking in the European Union before and after the Lisbon Treaty (DEUBAL). It mainly aims to assess what the changes were on particular subject areas that the Treaty of Lisbon envisaged and whether these ambitions have materialised since the Treaty entered into force. In other words, some of the DEUBAL papers offer both analyses of the past and of what the future may hold in light of these changes (and some of them may in fact only take effect in years to come). Others do not focus on the past but examine the extent to which the current decisionmaking process has been able to address the shortcomings and challenges of the past since the Lisbon rules entered into force and new practices have emerged. Included in this last category are also studies that examine the impact of aspects of the Lisbon Treaty that clarified pre-existing norms and structures, in some cases formalising them, rather than introducing new changes. The authors in this project all look at the interaction between formal rules and informal practices, seeking to point to the interaction between the two. They each adopt a loosely rationalist institutionalist approach, attributing rationality to actors (March and Olsen 1989). It is rationalist not so much in opposition to sociological institutionalism or to constructivism, but because authors attribute utility-maximising efforts to actors. In other words, actors seek to maximise their influence, and use the institutional structure for their own interests. If not, the assumption is that there is a good reason why they do not. The DEUBAL papers focus on different institutional aspects of changes to decision-making since Lisbon (basically comparing before and after). A Correspondence Address: [email protected] Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis


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number of them draw on empirical data offering quantitative analysis, others draw on qualitative methods (case studies) or interviews conducted for this project. Some papers look at individual EU institutions; others at the relationship between the EU and member states and one contribution even assesses the role of the EU in other international organisations (the United Nations (UN)). While few authors dispute the significance of the Lisbon Treaty for the development of the EU, it is significant that many of the changes implemented by the Lisbon Treaty that are analysed here appear to have minimal or at least uncertain implications for the practical functioning of the European Union. These results underscore the extent to which many of the Lisbon Treaty reforms represented formalisation of pre-existing norms rather than substantive innovations. There are of course exceptions, as demonstrated by a brief review of the articles contained in this special issue. This special issue contains a selection of the papers developed by the DEUBAL project. The sequence is as follows. First, Amy Verdun, in her paper titled ‘Decision-Making Before and After Lisbon: The Impact of Changes in Decision-Making Rules’ examines the institutional rules and the decision-making process in the EU before and after the Lisbon Treaty. She asks questions such as: what were the challenges that the EU responded to that ultimately led to the Lisbon Treaty? What institutional changes were made? What has been the outcome of these changes? Have they led to the desired results? If we look at these results through various European integration theory lenses, what can we learn? Her contribution briefly examines the challenges that the EU responded to that ultimately led to the Lisbon Treaty and the institutional changes made. She assesses the outcome of these changes and briefly discusses whether they have generated the desired results. Finally, her paper makes a contribution to the interpretation of these changes and results from various theoretical perspectives. Partially building on a similar focus on institutional change, Michelle Cini’s paper, entitled ‘EU Decision-Making on Inter-Institutional Agreements: Defining (Common) Rules of Conduct for European Lobbyists and Public Servants’, demonstrates that a number of attempts have been made, especially by the European Commission, to encourage common rules of conduct across the EU institutions. The introduction of a provision in the Lisbon Treaty allowing EU institutions to forge binding inter-institutional agreements (IIAs) draws attention to the limited research that exists on these instruments of EU governance. Her contribution concentrates on the decision-making process in two cases: the successful creation of a common register for lobbyists; and the (so far) failed attempt to set up an inter-institutional advisory committee on public ethics. The aim of her research is to examine the conditions under which successful inter-institutional cooperation occurs at the EU level in cases where the EU institutions seek to regulate (and constrain) their own behaviour. In a contribution entitled ‘Delegated Powers and Inter-Institutional Relations in the EU after Lisbon: A Normative Assessment’, Thomas Christiansen and Mathias Dobbels focus on EU inter-institutional relations post-Lisbon. The


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European Parliament (EP) is frequently seen as the ‘big winner’ of the Lisbon Treaty, given the fact that several changes (e.g. extension of co-decision as the ordinary legislative procedure, introduction of the assent procedure to international agreements) have significantly extended its powers. The reform of comitology (Article 291) and the introduction of the new instrument of delegated acts (Article 290) are generally seen in the same light, marking the culmination of a long-standing quest on the part of the EP to gain equal rights with the Council in this area. The paper questions the view of an unconditional ‘success’ of the Parliament by examining in some detail the way in which the new provisions have been implemented. Christiansen and Dobbels find that the EP does not possess adequate capacity to exercise control over the delegated agenda, therefore the Commission gains even greater leeway for its agenda-setting role in this area. The authors also point to other possibly negative implications for legislative decision-making. There is a risk of delays in adoption of acts due to broader scope for disagreement between the Council and the EP as to whether to delegate the acts to the Commission. The analysis demonstrates the need to study the actual implementation of treaty provisions before coming to a conclusion about the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of treaty reform. In a paper entitled ‘Legislative Implications of the Lisbon Treaty: The (Potential) Role of Ideology’, Amie Kreppel examines the dual roles of national representatives within the European Council and the Council of the EU (Council of Ministers) as members of the executive branch at home and the legislative branch within the EU. The Lisbon Treaty clarifies the legislative character of the Council of the EU and expands the executive role of the European Council through the creation of a president and formal foreign minister. These changes open up new possibilities for shifting decision-making strategies and patterns of coalition formation within the now primarily legislative Council. In some cases these changes may create internal tensions within national governments (especially coalitions) as they perform their tasks at the EU level. Amie Kreppel’s paper looks at these relationships theoretically, beginning first with a reconceptualisation of the Council as a special kind of legislature (in line with the Lisbon Treaty’s clarification of its legislative role). After recasting the Council as a legislature that functionally only meets in committee, she examines the potential role of ideology in coalition formation within the various Council formations. This is followed by an empirical investigation of the actual ideological character of the various Council formations, which demonstrates the potential for significant ideological differentiation between formations. This research highlights the potential for Council formations to serve as distributive, rather than simply informational actors within the policy process of the EU. This suggests that the common assumption that actors within the Council share a unitary national interest needs to be re-assessed, particularly if we are to take the Lisbon Treaty at its word and understand the Council as part of the legislative branch. Běla Plechanovová, in her contribution entitled ‘National Actors in Post-Lisbon EU: Should We Expect a Change of National Strategies?’,


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addresses relations between national actors within the EU institutions before and after implementation of the Lisbon Treaty. She focuses, inter alia, on the following questions: how does the institutional setting influence the behaviour of these actors in the Council of the EU, in the EP and the Commission? Assuming that the Lisbon Treaty’s institutional modifications resulted in narrowing the options for the member states within the formal decision-making rules (stronger EP, broader application of qualified majority voting, QMV), the member states (national actors) should react to this shift by looking for replacement of opportunities to exert influence on the decision-making process. Plechanovová hypothesises that the actors will seek to coordinate their positions across the EU institutions and member states will more often rely on informal bargaining and politics, particularly within the trialogues in the early agreement procedure. Methodologically, the paper rests on the dataset of the co-decision files that include information on the national and political identity of all relevant actors in the legislative process (commissioners, EP rapporteurs, members of the Council) covering the period 2004 to 2011. These allow the author to associate the actors with particular groups of member states on the basis of the pattern of coalition-building in the Council. An alternative model follows the political affiliation of the actors according to the EP political groups. Statistical tests assess the chances of change in the dynamics of the legislative process as well as the coalition behaviour of national actors within the institutional setting after Lisbon. While the pre-Lisbon pattern of coalition-building in the Council influences the dynamics of the legislative process, particularly by the Commission–Council dichotomy, after the Lisbon Treaty came into force an increase in the influence of the EP rapporteur is evident, as well as an increasing role of the party political links between the actors across EU institutions. Robert Thomson, in his contribution entitled ‘Double versus Triple Majorities: Will the New Voting Rules in the Council of Ministers Make a Difference?’, analyses the effects of the Lisbon Treaty’s new system of QMV in the Council of Ministers. This new system attempts to allay concerns that the recent historic enlargements of the EU will lead to legislative gridlock. This research questions what difference the new rules will make in practice and to what extent formal procedural rules define the process through which EU actors’ policy positions are transformed into decision outcomes. The contribution examines these questions with a new dataset on legislative decision-making in the EU that includes information on the policy positions of each of the main political actors in the EU on over 300 controversial issues in legislative decision-making between 1998 and 2009. The first part of the analysis demonstrates that throughout the time period considered, informal bargaining rather than formal rules define the process through which actors’ policy positions are transformed into decision outcomes. The second part focuses specifically on the decisions taken during the post-2004 enlargement period. A counter-factual analysis of these decisions is conducted, exploring what would have happened had the Lisbon rules been applied to these decisions. The main finding is that even under the strong and unrealistic


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assumption that formal rules define the decision-making process, decision outcomes would have been the same in most cases. In his paper ‘The Elusive Goal of Continuity? Legislative Decision-Making and the Council Presidency before and after Lisbon’, Andreas Warntjen shows how the Council presidency operated before the Lisbon Treaty and what the reasons for change were. While the institution of the permanent president of the European Council was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, the rotating presidency of the Council remained in place. Indeed, for decades observers have lamented the lack of an office ensuring the continuity of the Council’s work, not least in the legislative field. However, the presidency continues to rotate every six months between member states at the ministerial and working group level. This paper reviews the debates regarding the Council Presidency leading up to the changes in the Lisbon Treaty and presents the opinions of the officials on its role. Warntjen argues that the changes adopted in Lisbon – contrary to its stated purpose – are unlikely to increase the continuity of the Council’s work. Desmond Dinan, in ‘The Post-Lisbon European Council Presidency: An Interim Assessment’, addresses the development of the European Council Presidency from its past to the present time. He argues that three observations merit a more in-depth study of the role of the European Council. First, is the European Council as a decision-making forum, because more and more decisions are taken there. Second, the nature of these meetings is changing; they are increasingly difficult and contentious. Third, the Lisbon Treaty has the potential to change the dynamics because of the elected Council President, but it is as yet unclear how. Dinan’s contribution assesses the various European Council meetings and analyses them based on the formal agenda, the information in newspapers provided before and after European Council meetings, and published statements by national leaders to national parliaments and national media and to the European Parliament. He aims to locate national and European positions at these meetings, identify the dynamics of European Council meetings and to show who are the key decision-shapers and -makers. For instance, what is the role of the President of the European Council, the Franco-German alliance, the European Commission? The paper then moves on to examine if the elected nature of the European Council President is likely to make a difference to European Council meetings post-Lisbon. Xi Jin and Madeleine O. Hosli, in their contribution on ‘Pre- and PostLisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly’, analyse the effects of the Lisbon Treaty on the ways in which the EU presents itself as an actor in global politics. Their research explores this issue for the case of voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The authors study the voting behaviour of EU states in the UNGA between 1993 and the end of 2012, and assess voting cohesion among EU member states for the phases pre- and post-Lisbon. They interpret the EU presence at the UNGA in terms of a principal–agent model within the neo-institutionalist framework. The empirical findings, comparing EU voting in the UNGA before and after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, reveal that there is no significant difference in EU voting


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cohesion within the UNGA before and after ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. It even seems, comparing average values on EU coherence, that voting cohesion has slightly declined in the post-Lisbon as compared to the pre-Lisbon era. In addition to this finding, the authors demonstrate that currently EU voting cohesion is not markedly different from that of other regional organisations within the UNGA. This implies that EU coordination in international organisations, although stronger than in earlier decades, may still need strengthening in the future if the EU really aims to be speaking ‘with one voice’ in the global realm. The institutional innovations that the Lisbon Treaty has provided, notably the introduction of the function of the High Representative, and improved patterns of EU policy coordination in New York, are likely to lead to more coherent EU behaviour within the UNGA in the years to come. In the their contribution entitled ‘Issue Congruence across Legislative Terms: Examining the Democratic Party Mandate in the European Parliament’, Christine Arnold and Eliyahu V. Sapir investigate the connection between the voting behaviour of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and the wishes of their selectorate, i.e. the national parties and EU citizens. Considering that the scope of policy areas where the EP co-legislates under the ordinary legislative procedure was extended significantly by the Lisbon Treaty, it is important to know whether this major change in the distribution of powers within EU institutions is justifiable by the input legitimacy of the only directly elected EU institution. The authors assume that the EP should pass a basic test of connectedness between the public policy preferences of citizens and the legislative behaviour of the MEPs. They use data on policy goals from the manifestos of the European political parties for election to the EP and on public opinion on constitutional affairs, economic policy, foreign and security policy, and culture and education to test the MEPs’ link to their principals. The results of the analysis show that there is a certain level of congruence between the MEPs’ voting and the preferences of the national parties and the public, but there are also differences in behaviour across party groups. In general, the authors find higher congruence between the MEPs and their national party, reinforcing the second-order election thesis. Generally, research on the EU post-Lisbon era tends to be split into work suggesting substantive changes as a result of the Treaty and analyses that instead see a general continuation of the previous status quo, despite ‘Lisbon’. Although the various contributions to this special issue analyse different aspects of EU developments in a comparison pre- and post-Lisbon, they all focus on potential effects in terms of changed institutional provisions, behavioural consequences and repercussions in terms of patterns of EU governance and decision-making. The authors in this project find an interaction between formal rules and informal practices. They find that informal practices to date still dominate formal rules in a number of cases. However, these findings may be the result of the relatively short time that has passed since new rules have come into effect. Indeed, despite the significance of the Lisbon Treaty as a whole, our contributions predominantly demonstrate that there does not yet

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seem to be much change as a result of the treaty’s implementation. This may largely be due to the fact that in many ways the treaty formalised norms (as effective previous de jure patterns of behaviour). The actual effects of the Lisbon Treaty’s major innovations still have to come to the fore. The full effect of changes in institutional provisions need a few more years to materialise and will be subject to further future analysis.


Acknowledgements The project ‘Decision-Making in the European Union Before and After the Lisbon Treaty’ (DEUBAL), supported by the Jean Monnet Programme of the EU as a Multilateral Research Group, was set up in 2010 to analyse, theorise and conceptualise how decision-making would change as a result of the Lisbon Treaty. The project was funded between September 2010 and August 2012 and involved four main project partners – Amy Verdun (University of Victoria), Amie Kreppel (University of Florida), Běla Plechanovová (Charles University Prague) and Madeleine Hosli (Leiden University) – and several other academics linked to DEUBAL. Its research papers were first presented at a workshop held at Leiden University in November 2011 and then again – accompanied by ‘policy briefs’ – at the 5 June 2012 DEUBAL policy dissemination conference held in Brussels, to which academics and experts working in EU institutions and Brussels-based think tanks were invited. References Arnold, Christine, and Eliyahu V. Sapir (2013). ‘Issue Congruence across Legislative Terms: Examining the Democratic Party Mandate in the European Parliament’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1292–308. Christiansen, Thomas, and Mathias Dobbels (2013). ‘Delegated Powers and Inter-Institutional Relations in the EU after Lisbon: A Normative Assessment’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1159–77. Cini, Michelle (2013). ‘EU Decision-Making on Inter-Institutional Agreements: Defining (Common) Rules of Conduct for European Lobbyists and Public Servants’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1143–58. Dinan, Desmond (2013). ‘The Post-Lisbon European Council Presidency: An Interim Assessment’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1256–73. Jin, Xi, and Madeleine O. Hosli (2013). ‘Pre- and Post-Lisbon: European Union Voting in the United Nations General Assembly’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1274–91. Kreppel, Amie (2013). ‘Legislative Implications of the Lisbon Treaty: The (Potential) Role of Ideology’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1178–98. March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen (1989). Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: Free Press. Plechanovová, Běla (2013). ‘National Actors in Post-Lisbon EU: Should We Expect a Change of National Strategies?’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1199–220. Thomson, Robert (2013). ‘Double versus Triple Majorities: Will the New Voting Rules in the Council of Ministers Make a Difference?’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1221–38. Verdun, Amy (2013). ‘Decision-Making before and after Lisbon: The Impact of Changes in Decision-Making Rules’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1128–42. Warntjen, Andreas (2013). ‘The Elusive Goal of Continuity?, Legislative Decision-Making and the Council Presidency before and after Lisbon’, West European Politics, 36:6, 1239–55.