One agenda-setter or many? The varying success of policy initiatives by individual Directorates-General of the European Commission 1994–2016
| Author | Christian Rauh |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116520961467 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
One agenda-setter or
many? The varying
success of policy
initiatives by individual
Directorates-General
of the European
Commission 1994–2016
Christian Rauh
WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Analyses of strategic agenda-setting in the European Union treat the European
Commission as a unitary actor with perfect information. Yet, the constraints for cor-
rectly anticipating acceptable policies vary heavily across its individual Directorates-
General. Do these internal rifts affect the Commission’s agenda-setting ability? This
article tests corresponding expectations on the edit distances between 2237
Commission proposals and the adopted laws across 23 years. The quality of legislative
anticipation indeed varies with the responsible Directorate-General. Legislative pro-
posals are more likely to remain unchanged if they face less parliamentary involvement,
are less complex, were drafted by an experienced Directorate-General, and were
coordinated more seamlessly within the Commission. However, the uncovered varia-
tion also calls for more systematic research on the distribution of legislative capacities
inside the Commission.
Keywords
Agenda-setting, European Commission, European Parliament, legislative politics, text
analysis
Corresponding author:
Christian Rauh, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, Berlin D-10785, Germany.
Email: christian.rauh@wzb.eu
European Union Politics
2021, Vol. 22(1) 3–24
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116520961467
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Introduction
The European Commission is considered a key actor fueling, fostering, and shap-
ing the process of political integration in Europe. Depicted positively as the ‘engine
of European integration’ or negatively as a ‘runaway bureaucracy’, the
Commission is seen to significantly influence the speed and direction by which
political competences are transferred from the national to the supranational
level (Hooghe, 2001; Pollack, 1997; Sandholtz and Zysman, 1989). Scholars pri-
marily locate its influence in day-to-day policy making where the grand bargains
struck in the European Council are interpreted and transformed into binding rules
for Europe’s more than 500 million citizens. Early in the policy cycle, the
Commission can act as an informal agenda-setter or policy entrepreneur, e.g. by
creating judicial precedents (Schmidt, 2000), strategic information collection
(Haverland et al., 2018), or by setting up expert groups, initiating stakeholder
consultations, or issuing discussion papers (Princen and Rhinard, 2006).
When it then comes to formal policy making, the Commission controls another
precious asset that is of primary interest here: the exclusive prerogative of legisla-
tive initiative for most areas of European competence (Biesenbender, 2011).
Of course, any Commission proposal needs to find the agreement of the Council
of Ministers and often also the European Parliament (EP). But especially the
spatial modelling literature (e.g. Crombez and Vangerven, 2014; Selck, 2006;
Tsebelis and Garrett, 2001) suggests that the Commission’s first-mover advantage
nevertheless results in sizable legislative agenda-setting power. It allows the
Commission to select and to propose the one policy from the set of all feasible
ones that comes closest to its own preferences.
This article engages with this model of formal legislative agenda-setting in the
European Union (EU). I argue that the Commission’s legislative influence hinges
strongly on the quality of anticipation it can muster. Quality of anticipation refers
to the degree to which the Commission can correctly identify the set of politically
feasible policy choices before it tables its formal proposal. Correctly anticipating
the political leeway it enjoys for a given initiative is a necessary condition for the
Commission’s legislative success.
Yet, carving out this leeway is a resource-intensive business, and in-depth
analyses of policy formulation inside the Commission (e.g. Cram, 1994; Hartlapp
et al., 2014) emphasize that the individual Directorates-General (DGs) of the
Commission are not created equal in this regard. These case studies imply that
varying political clout of DG leaders, scarce administrative resources, internal
conflicts, and haphazard co-ordination limit the Commission’s capacity of strate-
gic anticipation. Accordingly, this article asks: how strongly and along which
factors does the quality of legislative anticipation vary across the individual
DGs of the European Commission?
In the following, I embed the disaggregated view on legislative anticipation
inside the Commission into the extant models of strategic agenda-setting power
in the EU. The research design to test the resulting hypotheses rests on the idea
4European Union Politics 22(1)
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