Conditional agenda‐setting and decision‐makinginsidethe European parliament

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article revisits two mistaken impressions about the process of European integration. The first is that the European Parliament (at least before Maastricht) is a weak Parliament. The second is that in a Europe of mutual recognition of standards (Cassis de Dijon), the natural level of harmonis‐ation standards is the lowest common denominator (or close to it) because countries with low standards have no incentive to vote for improvements. The article makes the argument that the basis for both of these mistaken impressions is lack of understanding of the European Parliament's role as ‘conditional agenda‐setter’, which is specified by the co‐operation procedure of the European Union. According to this procedure, the Parliament can make a proposal which, if accepted by the Commission, is easier for the Council to accept than to modify. Elsewhere, I have argued that this procedure places significant decision‐making powers in the hands of the Parliament.1 Here I make two extensions. First, I explain how this conditional agenda‐setting role of the Parliament (as well as the Commission) is responsible for the adoption by the EU of the most advanced social regulation policies of the world. Second, while in the past I had assumed the EP to be a unitary actor, here I relax this restrictive assumption and examine the possibilities generated at both the theoretical and the empirical levels by an EP composed of 518 members (or because of German unification 567, or after EU expansion 639). I argue that because of the internal organisation of the EP (more specifically the role of bill ‘rapporteurs’ and the co‐operative decision‐making process taking place inside Parliamentary committees), the power of the EP as a ‘conditional agenda‐setter’ holds for the actual EP, not merely for an idealiased unitary actor.

This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit: