The effect of trilogues on the European Commission's success in legislative negotiations: A reappraisal
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165241234150 |
| Author | Thomas Laloux |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
The effect of trilogues on
the European
Commission’s success in
legislative negotiations:
A reappraisal
Thomas Laloux
Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, UCLouvain, ISPOLE,
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Abstract
Informal negotiations have become the norm in the European Union legislative process.
Yet, researchers are divided over the effects of this change on the European
Commission’s ability to defend the content of its proposals from modifications by the
co-legislators. This article addresses this puzzle by using a fine-grained measure of
whether informal negotiations took place which includes trivial agreements,
namely legislation adopted in first reading because the co-legislators agree on the con-
tent, as a specific category. The results suggest that informal negotiations do not lead to
more changes to the Commission’s proposals than the formal process. This calls for a
better consideration of trivial agreements in studies of the European Union legislative
process.
Keywords
European Commission, legislative studies, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression,
ordinary legislative procedure, trilogues
Corresponding author:
Thomas Laloux, UCLouvain, Institut de sciences politiques Louvain-Europe, Place Montesquieu 1 bte L2.08.07,
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Email: thomas.g.laloux@uclouvain.be
Article
European Union Politics
2024, Vol. 25(2) 440–455
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165241234150
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Introduction
Since the early 2000s, legislative negotiations in the European Union (EU) have become
increasingly characterized by trilogues: informal, secluded meetings between representa-
tives of the Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament (EP) (Laloux, 2020).
Through successive revisions of treaties, co-decision (now ordinary legislative procedure
(OLP)) has become the norm for adopting legislation. Co-decision confers a monopoly
over legislative initiative upon the Commission, but grants the EP and the Council
co-legislative power (Cross and Hermansson, 2017). This means that the latter may
modify the Commission’s proposals, but for legislation to be adopted, they must both
agree on a common text. To facilitate the negotiations between them on amendments,
the co-legislators developed a system of informal meetings known as trilogues, which are
neither procedurally inscribed in, nor regulated by, the EU treaties (Roederer -Rynning
and Greenwood, 2015). In trilogues, representatives of the three legislative institutions
are tasked to negotiate a compromise that can then be formally adopted in the form of
so-called early agreements –legislation adopted early on the basis of an informal com -
promise. The use of trilogue negotiations is now the norm in EU decision-makin g
(Dionigi and Koop, 2017).
Trilogues have not only provided new opportunities to the actors involved in EU
legislation, but have also elicited constraints, giving rise to studies of their effect on
the balance of power between, and within, the co-legislators (Hoppe, 2020).
1
While
increased clarity has been discerned over their effect on the EP and the Council, it
is less clear how informal negotiations have affected the Commission (Kreppel,
2018). This is puzzling since it is commonly recognized as an important factor in
the EU legislative process (Nugent and Rhinard, 2019; Rauh, 2021) and is likely to
have been affected by informalization. In particular, existing studies yield contradic-
tory findings as to whether trilogues result in greater modifications to Commission
proposals by the co-legislators (Laloux, 2020). While Cross and Hermansson
(2017) find that the probability of successful amendments to a proposal significantly
increases in the case of informal negotiations, Kreppel (2018) finds no robust effect.
This leaves the impact of trilogues on the Commission’s success –that is, its ability to
maintain the content of its proposals during the legislative process –an unresolved
empirical question.
This puzzle is tackled by assessing whether informal negotiations have resulted in
more amendments to Commission proposals. Applying a finer-grained measure than pre-
vious research (see e.g. Cross and Hermansson, 2017; Reh et al., 2013), I argue that
examining the effect of informal negotiations demands more than measuring whether
or not informal negotiations occurred in a binary way. Rather, an account needs to be
taken of the proposals where inter-institutional disagreements are absent (Laloux,
2020), and proposals can thus be adopted in first readings with no negotiations taking
place (De Ruiter, 2013; Häge and Naurin, 2013). Even though these so-called trivial
agreements constitute a specific category of cases alongside formal and informal negotia-
tions (De Ruiter, 2013; Häge and Naurin, 2013; Toshkov and Rasmussen, 2012), they are
commonly conflated with other types of cases in the extant literature on trilogues. In this
Laloux 441
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