Delegation of committee reports in the European Parliament
| Author | Bjørn Høyland,Silje SL Hermansen,Fang-Yi Chiou |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519894059 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Delegation of
committee reports in the
European Parliament
Fang-Yi Chiou
Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
Silje SL Hermansen
PluriCourts, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Bjørn Høyland
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo,
Norway
Abstract
Committee coordinators face a classic delegation problem when assigning reports to
their committee members. Although a few theoretical developments have focused on
the effects of expertise on delegation, empirical studies have commonly assumed
monotonic effects. Based on existing informational models, we argue that a more
loyal committee member, everything else being equal, is more likely to be appointed
as a rapporteur and that more expertise, holding preference divergence constant, has a
non-monotonic effect because of informational credibility. Employing accumulated com-
mittee service as an expertise measure, these theoretical expectations are tested on all
committee report delegations in the European Parliament from 1979 to 2014. Our
empirical analysis with non-parametric and parametric hierarchical conditional logit
models renders strong support for these expectations. The results hold across
member states, political groups, procedures, committees and over time.
Keywords
Committees, delegation, European Parliament
Corresponding author:
Bjørn Høyland, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Postbox 1097, Blindern, 0317 Oslo,
Norway.
Email: bjorn.hoyland@stv.uio.no
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(2) 233–254
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519894059
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Introduction
The European Parliament (EP) is a committee-based legislature dominated by
political groups (Whitaker, 2001). How to identify, prioritize and allocate legisla-
tive proposals to rank-and-file members who negotiate on their behalf, becomes an
essential task for the group’s committee leadership. We argue that within-party
delegation of legislative tasks follows an informational rationale. The political
group needs information about the possible implications of policy proposals
that some of its (expert) members can provide. It consequently favors members
who have acquired expertise through specialization. However, this does not imply
that the members with the most expertise are the most preferred. This is due to
informational credibility concerns.
To develop our argument, we first review the literature on committee organi-
zation and report allocation in the EP. While there is some consensus regarding the
broad empirical patterns, the theories employed for accounting for these patterns
apply somewhat inconsistent logics. Building upon extant game-theoretic models
developed by Crawford and Sobel (1982) and Fischer and Stocken (2001), we
present an informational account of report delegation within political group com-
mittee delegations. We highlight the nuanced effects of loyalty and expertise on the
probability that a committee member is appointed as a rapporteur; that is, a
committee member assigned with the task of drafting a report on behalf of the
committee. While existing political science studies have conventionally asserted
that the principal is monotonically more likely to appoint an agent with more
expertise to pursue policy on the former’s behalf, Fischer and Stocken (2001)
theoretically demonstrate that this expectation falls short of a theoretical
foundation.
Another contribution of this article is the granularity of our data. While existing
research tests allocations at an aggregated level – for example, the number of
reports per term (e.g. Yoshinaka et al., 2010) – we consider only the alternatives
that the committee coordinator can realistically choose between. At each alloca-
tion, the coordinator can only select amongst committee members from the same
political group. We call this his ‘choice-set’. We then calculate the variables to
reflect the information available to the coordinator at the time of the decision. For
example, our loyalty score relies only on votes cast up to the time of the decision,
rather than averaging over whole time periods. Similarly, committee-specific policy
expertise is not measured in terms of binary categories such as incumbent or
freshman, but as days spent on the committee until the day of the report
delegation.
Across non-parametric and parametric conditional logit models, we find a linear
effect of loyalty and a non-monotonic effect of committee-specific policy expertise
on the probability of being delegated a report. While the coordinator initially
prefers expertise, growing expertise may not generate strictly positive returns.
This nuanced effect is consistent across member states, committees, political
groups, procedures and over time.
234 European Union Politics 21(2)
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