The EU Conciliation Committee
| Author | Anne Rasmussen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116507085958 |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The EU Conciliation
Committee
One or Several Principals?
Anne Rasmussen
European University Institute, Italy
ABSTRACT
Since the introduction of the co-decision legislative
procedure, the EU has had the possibility to resort to a
Conciliation Committee made up of representatives from the
European Parliament and the Council to reconcile differ-
ences between the two bodies. This article assesses whether
the members of this committee have an incentive to take
advantage of their ability to present take-it-or-leave-it offers
to their parent bodies by examining whether they are repre-
sentative of their full body and/or whether they represent
other interests inside or outside their legislative body. It
concludes that the EU Conciliation Committee is generally
representative of its parent bodies and that the option to go
to conciliation is not a risky tool for them to reach agreement.
87
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116507085958
Volume 9 (1): 87–113
Copyright© 2008
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore
KEY WORDS
co-decision
Conciliation Committee
European Parliament
The European Union has developed considerably since its inception and has
increasingly grown to resemble a domestic political system. A crucial step in
this process was the introduction of the bicameral, co-decision legislative
procedure, which enables the European Parliament (EP) and the Council to
meet directly to resolve disagreements in a Conciliation Committee. This
committee can exert a significant influence on the legislative files it reconciles
which typically affect the daily lives of millions of EU citizens. Hence, it has
the potential to suggest compromises that the Council and the EP cannot
amend but have to accept, unless they do not want any new legislation at all.
The members of the Conciliation Committees are not free to do what they
want, but must act within an institutional framework. However, these insti-
tutions do not determine their behaviour because the entire rationale of dele-
gation is to give the delegates a certain freedom of manoeuvre to enable them
to reach a compromise. Hence, the question of who serves on these
committees is important and the legislative bodies have an interest in appoint-
ing delegates whose loyalty lies in defending their position.
Whether they actually succeed in doing so has not been examined in the
very sparse literature on EU Conciliation Committees. This paper conducts
the first study on the composition of EU Conciliation Committees analysing
the actual policy positions of the conciliation delegates. General ideological
scores are used to measure policy positions, and data are included on all the
EP conciliation delegates in the first five years after the entering into force of
the Amsterdam Treaty, i.e. from 1 May 1999 to 30 April 2004. The idea is that
conciliation members can be seen as agents who may serve different princi-
pals, only one of whom is their legislative body as a whole. The key question
that will be answered is thus: In line with whose interests are the conciliation
delegations set up?
I examine only whether the EP appoints conciliation delegates whose
loyalty lies in defending the position of their legislative body. It can be
assumed that the Council delegation has no incentive to try to move legis-
lative outcomes away from what Council would want. Firstly, each member
state is represented in the delegation. Secondly, the members of the delegation
are not politicians (except one1); they are generalist-oriented diplomats (so-
called ‘deputy permanent representatives’), who are not loyal to a particular
sector, but work directly for the foreign offices of the member states. Thirdly,
there is no question of the Council appointing either an extreme or a moderate
delegation according to its strategy in a given circumstance since it is always
represented by the same people in conciliation. The Council delegation is in
many ways the Council. Instead, I focus on the EP’s delegation here. With a
fixed Council delegation, there is no strategic need for the EP to adapt the
composition of its delegation on a case-by-case basis to that of the Council.
European Union Politics 9(1)
88
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