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Supplemental Material for Studying power and influence in the European Union: Exploiting the complexity of post-Lisbon legislation with EUR-Lex by Jens Blom-Hansen in European Union Politics

Most European Union rules are made by the Commission, not the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament. But although the Commission is an important rule-maker, it is not autonomous. The member states have always taken care to install committees to control the Commission (comitology). However, the Lisbon Treaty introduced alternative control mechanisms (delegated acts) and a reform of the comitology system (implementing acts). This article investigates how the post-Lisbon control system works in daily legislative practice. It represents the first investigation of the institutional preferences of the Council, the Parliament and the Commission in the new system. Further, it utilizes better data than previous studies. The analysis is based on data on the control preferences of all actors before the first trilogue meeting for a large number of cases in the period 2010–13. The results indicate that the institutional battle over the control of delegated rule-making is far from over. Most European Union rules are made by the Commission, not the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament. But although the Commission is an important rule-maker, it is not autonomous. The member states have always taken care to install committees to control the Commission (comitology). However, the Lisbon Treaty introduced alternative control mechanisms (delegated acts) and a reform of the comitology system (implementing acts). This article investigates how the post-Lisbon control system works in daily legislative practice. It represents the first investigation of the institutional preferences of the Council, the Parliament and the Commission in the new system. Further, it utilizes better data than previous studies. The analysis is based on data on the control preferences of all actors before the first trilogue meeting for a large number of cases in the period 2010–13. The results indicate that the institutional battle over the control of delegated rule-making is far from over.

Every year the EU Commission issues thousands of rules based on powers delegated by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. But delegation is carefully controlled. Traditionally, control has been exerted through a system of committees of member state representatives (‘comitology’). However, this system was contested by the European Parliament which was left without any influence. The Lisbon Treaty introduced a new control regime for delegated powers, the so-called delegated acts system, which was meant to supplement the existing system. The new system involves direct control by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament and thus for the first time gave the European Parliament real influence over delegated powers. However, the choice over which delegation regime to use in practice has turned into one of the most vehement institutional conflicts in the EU political system. Controlling the EU executive represents the first comprehensive investigation of this conflict. It does so by a combination of methods and data, including process-tracing of the introduction of the new system in the Lisbon Treaty, case studies of selected post-Lisbon delegation situations and statistical analysis of datasets comprising hundreds of post-Lisbon legislative files.

According to fiscal illusion theory, voters misperceive fiscal parameters because of incomplete information. The costs of public services are underestimated, implying that if voters had full information, their support for public services would drop. The literature has focused on testing the implications of fiscal illusions, whereas the question why fiscal illusions occur at all has received less attention. According to the standard argument, individuals base their opinion of policy proposals on a valuation of benefits and costs. We formalize the standard argument and show that it is a special case of the attention model of fiscal illusion. In this model, opinion depends on the saliency of attributes of the proposal. We show that the attention model can better explain fiscal illusion by deriving competing hypotheses, which are tested in a survey experiment. We conclude that the mechanism behind fiscal illusion is attention and framing, not incomplete information.

The public administration literature provides ample reasons why civil servants may be influential in public policy. However, for three decades, the ‘politics matters’ literature has found that political ideology is an important explanation of public policy, which indicates that politicians actually control their civil servants. But, the ‘politics matters’ literature systematically fails to include the influence of the bureaucracy. In fact, it is almost impossible to identify a single study in this literature that controls for the influence of the permanent bureaucracy. In this paper we investigate whether politics still matters when bureaucratic preferences are taken into account. We do this in a simultaneous test of political and bureaucratic influences on public budgets, a policy measure often studied in the ‘politics matters’ literature. We find that political preferences trump bureaucratic ones in policy areas salient to the public, but not in less salient areas. This might be comforting news from a democratic perspective. However, since public budgets represent an easy case for political influence, it is food for thought that political preferences do not always prevail.

Comitology is an important part of the EU’s regulatory framework. Hence, lobbying by outside interests is to be expected. However, lobbying in the comitology system has received almost no scholarly attention. This paper provides the first understanding of the subject by analysing the access of business interests to actors in the comitology system. The analysis is designed as a most likely study of two cases, aviation safety and CO2 quotas. Based on Bouwen’s rationalist theory of access goods, the empirical analysis shows that lobbying is prevalent, especially by sectoral interests providing expert knowledge and targeted mainly at the Commission, but also at the member states in the comitology committees, and the European Parliament. The case studies therefore indicate that lobbying is widespread in the comitology system and important to study in order to understand the outputs from this part of the EU political system.

The literature on tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) shows how limiting the freedom of local governments to levy taxes may have considerable unexpected effects. Entities subjected to such limitations may, as their proponents hope, react by cutting expenditures and revenue, but they may also strategically change their revenue structure and increase reliance on income sources not subjected to limitations. However, these findings are overwhelmingly based on studies of state and local governments in the USA. Their relevance outside this empirical setting remains unclear. A study of Denmark, where the central government imposed tax limitations on municipalities in 2009, makes two contributions. First, it probes the empirical domain of the US findings. Second, it constitutes an empirical testing ground where endogeneity is not a pressing concern. In the USA, TELs are often self-imposed either by local legislatures or by citizens through voter initiatives, which may bias the correlation between TELs and tax rates. We analyze a dataset of all Danish municipalities from 2007–2011 and demonstrate that TELs do indeed stop taxes from increasing but also confirm the findings from the TEL literature that entities subjected to tax limitations employ revenue-shifting strategies. In Denmark, however, these strategies are contingent on the specifics of the Danish intergovernmental system, which render central government grants an attractive object of revenue-shifting strategies. Our analysis thus helps identify the scope conditions of core findings within the literature.

Reelt er processen om Finansloven blændværk. Finanslovsforliget omfatter mindre end 1 pct. af de samlede udgifter. Hvorfor er der så lidt opmærksomhed omkring de 99 pct. af statens udgifter, som ikke er omfattet af forliget? Pressen kunne spille en rolle, men gør det ikke.

The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty has presented the three EU institutions with a rare opportunity to completely re-design the system of control of the Commission’s delegated powers. Hitherto, the Commission’s ability to adopt implementing measures was controlled via the by now well-known comitology system, that has undergone only minor changes since it was introduced in the early 1960s. Since the new Treaty distinguishes between delegated and implementing acts, and also specifies that the rules of the game for implementing acts have to be decided via a co-decision regulation, all institutions attempted to secure strong control positions in the newly emerging system. Now that the new system has been finally agreed upon, this paper asks the qui bono question: Who benefits from the new system, and how did those actors get what they wanted? In our analysis we treat the negotiations on the new system as a game of structural choice, and trace back the course of the negotiations through a close analysis of formal and informal documents and interviews. Although in the end we find much support for our hypotheses, we find that the course of events in some respects has gone further than we theoretically expected.

Udgivelsesdato: 6. oktober