Party group coordinators and rapporteurs: Discretion and agency loss along the European Parliament’s chains of delegation
| Author | Steffen Hurka,Michael Kaeding,Lukas Obholzer |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519827383 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Union Politics
Party group coordinators
2019, Vol. 20(2) 239–260
! The Author(s) 2019
and rapporteurs:
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519827383
Discretion and agency
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
loss along the European
Parliament’s chains
of delegation
Lukas Obholzer
Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universit€at
Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Steffen Hurka
Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science,
LMU Munich, Munich, Germany
Michael Kaeding
Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen,
Duisburg, Germany
Abstract
The European Parliament organizes its legislative activities along two chains of delega-
tion to the rapporteurs – one institutional, one partisan. We analyze discretion and
agency loss along these chains of delegation from the perspective of party group
coordinators who select the rapporteur on behalf of the party group. Do coordinators
minimize agency loss towards their national party, their European party group, the
committee median or the plenary median when allocating reports? Data from the
2009–2014 legislative term demonstrate that coordinators tend to select rapporteurs
who are close to their own national party’s ideal point on the integration dimension.
Corresponding author:
Lukas Obholzer, Center for European Integration, Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universit€at
Berlin, Ihnestraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
Email: lukas.obholzer@fu-berlin.de
240
European Union Politics 20(2)
This has important implications for intra-parliamentary and intra-party delegation, party
group cohesion and broader policy-making in the European Union.
Keywords
Coordinators, delegation, European Parliament, party groups, rapporteurs
Introduction
The recent literature on decision-making in the European Union (EU) reflects an
increasing awareness of the role of individual actors for decision outcomes. While
early scholarship on EU bargaining typically conceptualized the EU institutions as
unitary actors who seek to maximize their collective utility (e.g. Tsebelis, 1994),
more recent research aims to shed light on the variance of preferences of individual
decision makers within these institutions and how the selection of these individuals
matters for the legislative process. In particular, research on the European
Parliament (EP) has increasingly focused on political dynamics taking place at
the institution’s committee level, where the EP’s policy positions are strongly
influenced by powerful individual legislators, the so-called rapporteurs. In the con-
text of augmented powers of the EP following different treaty revisions (Hix and
Høyland, 2013) and the increasing informalization of EU decision-making (Farrell
and He´ritier, 2004; Reh et al., 2013), these individual actors have become extreme-
ly important (Costello and Thomson, 2010). This article contributes to the litera-
ture investigating the factors that determine the selection of these rapporteurs.
It adopts a principal–agent perspective and analyzes the extent to which the selec-
tion of a particular rapporteur is associated with potential agency loss for the
various different principals the rapporteur is supposed to serve.
We argue that the EP is characterized by two complementary chains of delega-
tion. On the one hand, the institutional chain of delegation runs from the plenary
to the standing committees, which in turn delegate the tasks of drafting the EP’s
position and representing the EP in inter-institutional negotiations to individual
rapporteurs. In this chain, the rapporteur serves as the agent of the committee and
by implication, of the plenary as a whole. On the other hand, the rapporteur also
serves as an agent of his or her transnational party group as the final link in the
partisan chain of delegation. Since rapporteurs enjoy a clear informational advan-
tage when they engage in the formulation of the EP position due to their privileged
access to policy-relevant information and their enhanced resources (Kaeding,
2004), agency loss is potentially an issue in both chains of delegation. Yet the
risk of agency loss is strongly influenced by party group coordinators, who
make the final call on who becomes rapporteur (Daniel and Thierse, 2018). This
contribution assesses the extent to which delegation within the EP entails risk of
agency loss along the institutional and partisan chains of delegation, adopting the
Obholzer et al.
241
perspective of the party group coordinators: Do coordinators minimize potential
agency loss towards their national party’s – and, by proxy, their own – ideal point
when picking a rapporteur? Do they serve their party group by predominantly
selecting rapporteurs close to the party group median? Or do they follow institu-
tional considerations by picking rapporteurs close to the committee or EP median?
The article answers these questions using an original dataset that connects
information on Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), coordinators and
rapporteurs in EP7 (2009–2014). In order to measure the positions of the relevant
actors, the analysis draws on data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES),
which provides national party positions on the left–right and integration
dimensions (Bakker et al., 2015; Polk et al., 2017). These are the dominant dimen-
sions in the EP (Hix et al., 2007), and, based on research on voting behavior in the
EP (Hix, 2002), national parties’ positions can be reasonably used as proxies for
MEPs’ own positions. Drawing on CHES data, we also calculate the positions of
party groups, committees and the EP as a whole based on seat-weighted positions
of the constitutive national parties.
The results demonstrate that party group coordinators primarily care about the
ideal point of their national party when nominating rapporteurs from their party
group’s committee contingent. They nominate rapporteurs who minimize the dis-
tance to their own national party rather than the plenary, committee or party
group median. This finding holds on the integration dimension rather than the
left–right dimension for all types of reports as well as Ordinary Legislative
Procedure (OLP) reports, which lead to binding legislation.
The relevance of rapporteurs for EU decision-making
With the coming into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the EP co-legislated under the
OLP in roughly 89% of legislative procedures during the 2009–2014 legislative
term (Pittella et al., 2014: 3). Changes to the legislative procedure in the
Amsterdam Treaty allowed for so-called first reading and early second reading
agreements (93% in EP7 according to Pittella et al., 2014: 8), in which the EP
rapporteur negotiates a deal with the Council even before and/or around when the
first reading takes place in the plenary of the EP. The politics of early agreements
has been subject to a large body of research (e.g. Brandsma, 2015; Bressanelli et al.,
2016; Costello and Thomson, 2010; Farrell and He´ritier, 2003, 2004; He´ritier and
Reh, 2012; Rasmussen and Reh, 2013; Reh, 2014; Reh et al., 2013). While these
studies vary in terms of the precise focus they put on the political process, they all
share the notion that early agreements have tremendously increased the impor-
tance of individual legislators in the EP, in particular rapporteurs.
In keeping with this, previous studies demonstrated that rapporteurs wield sig-
nificant influence over the final position of their committee and thereby the EP as a
whole. For instance, amendments tabled by the rapporteur during committee
negotiations are only rarely challenged successfully by the other committee mem-
bers (Hurka, 2013). Moreover, rapporteurs not only influence the EP position if
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European Union Politics 20(2)
early agreements are made under the OLP and when the consultation procedure
applies (Costello and Thomson, 2010), but also significantly influence the final
bargaining outcome when they represent the EP in inter-institutional negotiations
(Costello and Thomson, 2011; Farrell and He´ritier, 2004).
Rapporteurs are selected at the committee level of the EP and given the fact that
committees are the central workplaces of the institution (Neuhold, 2001;
Yordanova, 2013), they have recently received a strong increase in academic atten-
tion. While some have focused on the determinants of committee membership
(McElroy, 2006; Yordanova, 2009), others have put more emphasis on the legis-
lative practices taking place at the committee level (Costello and Thomson, 2010;
Finke, 2012; Roger and Winzen, 2015). By far the largest literature, however, has
developed on the factors that influence the selection of the committees’ rapporteurs
(e.g. Benedetto, 2005; Daniel, 2013; Hausemer, 2006; Høyland, 2006; Kaeding,
2004, 2005; Yordanova, 2011; Yoshinaka et al., 2010). These studies have brought
to light a wide range of factors that matter for the selection of individual rappor-
teurs, such as their education and seniority (Daniel, 2013), their relative ideological
positions (Kaeding, 2004; Yoshinaka et al., 2010), their expertise in a given issue
area (Yoshinaka et al., 2010) and the question of whether their national party is
represented in the Council (Høyland, 2006). However, none of these studies explic-
itly acknowledges the fact that any rapporteur selection necessarily entails varying
degrees risk of agency loss (depending on the principal) and the crucial role played
by the individual who is ultimately responsible for the rapporteur selection: the
party group coordinator.
Party group...
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