Power and transparency in political negotiations
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519870870 |
| Author | Philipp Broniecki |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Power and transparency
in political negotiations
Philipp Broniecki
ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research
Centre, University of Essex, Colchester, UK
Abstract
Who gains legislative influence in early agreement negotiations (trilogues) between the
European Parliament and the Council of the European Union? Practitioners from both
institutions suspect that it is the other side. Meanwhile, critics point at trilogues’ lack of
transparency. This article proposes that legislative power and institutional transparency
are inversely related: Opacity makes an actor more influential in political negotiations.
The argument is tested on a matched sample of legislative files from the 1999–2009
period. The findings suggest that the European Parliament became more influential in
early agreement negotiations – where it became opaque vis-a
`-vis the Council. In such
negotiations, the relative influence of the European Parliament substantially increased;
by contrast, the European Parliament did not gain influence in negotiations where it
remained transparent.
Keywords
Bargaining success, institutions, negotiation, transparency, trilogues
Tripartite meetings (trilogues) are informal negotiations between the European
Parliament (EP) and the Council of the European Union (Council), and they
involve the Commission as an interlocutor. While trilogues have become a stan-
dard mode of European Union (EU) lawmaking, practitioners and scholars
disagree on whether and how the institutional balance of power is affected.
1
Did
the Council – traditionally considered to be the more powerful of the two
Corresponding author:
Philipp Broniecki, ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre, University of Essex, Parkside
2C, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK.
Email: philipp.broniecki@essex.ac.uk
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(1) 109–129
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519870870
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chambers – become more influential or did the EP gain influence? According to
Council representatives, the location of trilogues alone makes a difference:
Negotiations take place on the EP’s premises where in some rooms ‘[...]
Parliament’s key negotiators often sit on a podium looking down on the rest’
(Dionigi and Koop, 2017: 55). Furthermore, the EP can better handle negotiations
because the legislative workload is more evenly spread out among its members
(H€
age and Keading, 2007). Representatives from the EP, on the other hand, see the
Council’s negotiating hand strengthened because the preparation of the EP man-
date has recently become public, whereas the Council’s secretive working methods
allow it to bargain more effectively (European Parliament, 2014). Even though
both chambers see themselves at a disadvantage in trilogues, both accept the prac-
tice as such (Dionigi and Koop, 2017). Meanwhile, the European news media
(Cooper, 2016; Fox, 2014) and the scholarly literature (Farrell and He
´ritier,
2003, 2004; Shackleton and Raunio, 2003) have criticised trilogues for their lack
of transparency.
In this article, I systematically analyse EU inter-institutional power in the light
of informal lawmaking. Is the balance of power affected and if so, under what
condition does the EP gain or lose influence relative to the Council? The central
argument in this paper is that reduced transparency – opacity – makes an actor
more influential in political negotiations.
The relationship between transparency and bargaining success has important
implications for the inter-institutional balance of power in the EU. The article
contributes to the literature on institutional influence in the EU (e.g. Costello
and Thomson, 2013; H€
age and Keading, 2007; K€
onig and Junge, 2009;
Thomson, 2011) and the literature on the consequences of informal lawmaking
(e.g. Farrell and He
´ritier, 2003, 2004; Rasmussen and Reh, 2013; Shackleton and
Raunio, 2003). The former has missed the effect of varying degrees of institutional
transparency on power dynamics. The latter has disregarded the effect of informal
lawmaking on inter-institutional influence.
Empirically, the EP’s relative influence is analysed based on salient pieces of
legislation in the 1999–2009 period. The paper draws on data from the ‘Decision
Making in the European Union II’ (DEUII) data set (Thomson et al., 2012) and
the ‘Dataset on The Informal Politics of Codecision’ (Bressanelli et al., 2014; Reh
et al., 2013). Influence is measured in a spatial framework as the degree of prefer-
ence attainment. The measure of relative influence, used in this article, builds on
the extant literature (e.g. Aksoy, 2010; Bailer, 2004; Bailer and Schneider, 2006;
Du
¨r, 2008; Du
¨r et al., 2015) and enhances interpretability and versatility for two
reasons. First, it is a relative measure of influence, and second, by separating
expected from realised outcome, it can easily include multiple theoretically moti-
vated determinants of expected outcomes such as salience and status quo
constraints.
Theoretically, the argument draws on bargaining theory. Under incomplete
information, two actors involved in negotiations may be uncertain about the
other’s true preference. Both must then decide which policy change they are willing
110 European Union Politics 21(1)
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