Winners and Losers in the European Union
| Published date | 01 March 2004 |
| Author | Frans Stokman,Robert Thomson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116504040443 |
| Date | 01 March 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Journal Article |
Winners and Losers in the
European Union
Frans Stokman
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Robert Thomson
The RAND Corporation, The Netherlands
5
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116504040443
Volume 5 (1): 5–23
Copyright© 2004
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
Introduction
This special issue examines legislative decision-making in the European
Union (EU). By focusing on specific examples of legislative decision-making
and actors’ preferences in those situations, we aim to address questions of
interest to mainstream Europeanists. Two contributions identify and attempt
to explain which actors – of the Commission, the European Parliament and
the individual member states – won and lost in controversial policy decisions
in recent years. A third investigates shifts in actors’ positions during the
bargaining process that takes place between the introduction of a Commission
proposal and the adoption of the legislative acts. A fourth article examines
measures of member states’ power that take into consideration the policy
positions they favour, as well as the number of votes they hold in the Council.
Similar questions have been studied in many descriptive studies on decision-
making in the EU carried out in recent years. Examples include Nugent (1989),
Westlake (1994, 1995), Wallace and Wallace (1996), Richardson (1996),
Peterson and Bomberg (1999) and Dinan (1999). In this special issue, we aim
to build upon these insights but also to go further than description, by formu-
lating and testing alternative explanations of victory and defeat and of shifts
in actors’ positions during the bargaining process. That requires both the
elaboration of explicit theories of decision-making – in general and in the EU
in particular – and the collection of appropriate data to test alternative expla-
nations statistically. It was these two aims that brought a group of researchers
together. Encouraged by the European Consortium for Political Research
(ECPR) and supported by funds from two national science foundations and
01 040443 (to/d) 9/1/04 11:25 am Page 5
a private foundation, our research group Decision-making in the European
Union (DEU) began the project in 1998.1We collected information on the
controversial issues raised during the discussions on a selection of 66 legis-
lative proposals from the period 1996–2001. These data are primarily based
on extensive, semi-structured interviews with key informants. Our book The
European Union Decides (Thomson et al., forthcoming) assesses the empirical
relevance of alternative models of the legislative process by comparing the
models’ forecasts of decision outcomes with actual outcomes. This assessment
is based primarily on the application of statistical methods to determine
which models provide the most accurate forecasts of these outcomes. In this
special issue, we compare the models by focusing on the actor-level processes
they address – in particular, the extent to which the actors involved won or
lost in terms of the outcomes of the legislative process. We thereby aim to
address research questions that are of interest to a wider audience and to
promote discussion on the project.
Power-oriented studies emphasize actor characteristics that provide
certain actors with more clout than others, thereby increasing the likelihood
they will prevail over others in the course of decision-making. In the context
of the European Union, many studies emphasize that size and economic
resources define the extent to which member states’ preferences are taken into
account. The influence of size is partly reflected in the institutional arrange-
ments of the EU, which give larger member states more votes in the Council
and more representatives in the European Parliament. The effects of the differ-
ential weighting of member states in the Council on their a priori voting
power has been the main subject of voting power studies (see, for example,
Brams and Affuso, 1985; Hosli, 1993; Lane and Maeland, 1995; Widgrén, 1994,
1995). This approach has also been applied to estimate the relative influence
of party groupings in the European Parliament (Hosli, 1997; Raunio, 1997).
Voting power indices provide insight into an important aspect of actors’
power within voting bodies. They are not intended to incorporate other insti-
tutional power resources, such as the agenda-setting power of the European
Commission and the increasing institutional power of the European Parlia-
ment relative to the Commission and Council, first under the cooperation and
later under the co-decision procedure. Consequently, a number of studies
shifted attention to the strategic interactions among the European institutions
(see, for example, Steunenberg, 1994; Schneider, 1995; Tsebelis and Garrett,
1996; Garrett and Tsebelis, 1999). This resulted in various debates on the
appropriate interpretations of the EU’s legislative procedures, particularly
about the importance of the European Parliament and the Commission under
cooperation (e.g. Moser, 1996, versus Tsebelis, 1996) and co-decision (e.g.
Tsebelis and Garrett, 1997, versus Steunenberg, 1997, and Crombez, 2000).
European Union Politics 5(1)
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