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Reputational theory holds that an agency's reputation is a valuable political asset. However, since Daniel Carpenter's influential contributions, reputational studies have focused on reactions to reputational threats, rather than on reputation as such. Therefore, there is a curious lacuna at the heart of reputation studies: A lot is known about reactions to reputational threats, but fundamental questions about reputation per se are left unexplored. This paper investigates the dimensionality of the reputational concept, its variation across types of audiences, and its consistency across agency subunits. This is done in the context of the EU Commission, the core executive institution of the European Union. While this case is interesting in itself, its main value is to suggest what a research agenda focusing on the core building blocks of reputational theory might look like. Our survey of actors in the EU's Transparency Register provides mixed, but mostly supportive evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the inclusion of regulations in studies of EU policy implementation and compliance. Although both EU directives and EU regulations are to be implemented by the member states, the literature has devoted almost exclusive attention to directives. This is because, first, directives are considered more important than regulations. Second, the notification of the transposition of directives provides a convenient way to compare implementation records. Third, the transposition of directives allegedly introduces an extra implementation step. However, upon closer inspection all three reasons are flawed. Regulations – like directives – often require national rules to enter into effect, a fact long accepted by the European Court of Justice. This creates a situation remarkably similar to the transposition of directives. By analysing two case studies, we contribute by detailing this politico-legal situation, demonstrating its empirical relevance and sketching a new research agenda on the supplementation of EU regulations with national rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the "better regulation" agenda, the European Commission created a semi‐independent institution, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, to monitor the preparation of policy proposals. The position of this Board is potentially wide‐ranging. A proposal that is not given the green light by it cannot proceed in the Commission's internal decisionmaking process. But so far, the Board has only received scant scholarly attention. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board on the Commission's policy preparation. Using machine learning techniques and quantitative text analysis, we study 673 Board opinions and compare almost 100 draft and final policy proposals. Our findings show that the Board is an active watchdog that is taken seriously by the Commission's departments. A full understanding of policy preparation in the EU therefore requires more scholarly attention to the Regulatory Scrutiny Board. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lisbon Treaty fundamentally changed EU legislation. It introduced a new hierarchy of acts, new types of acts and new decision-making procedures. However, instead of replacing the pre-Lisbon types of acts and procedures, it added to them. The legislative landscape is therefore now more complex than before. However, to political scientists, this complexity represents new opportunities to study power and influence. But these opportunities have been under-exploited so far. The article explains the complex post-Lisbon situation and uses legislative output from the period 2012–2017 to discuss how much the various types of acts and decision procedures are used in practice. The advantages and drawbacks of the EUR-Lex database are discussed, and a guide to navigate this database is provided. The article concludes by pointing to the potential of using the full complexity of the post-Lisbon legislative landscape and the EUR-Lex database for analysing the politics of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 CO2quotas. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Lisbon Treaty represented a rare opportunity to redesign parliamentary control of the European Commission's delegated powers. The new Treaty distinguishes between delegated and implementing acts and specifies that comitology rules must be decided by a co-decision regulation. This necessitated a reform of the comitology system, which was decided in December 2010 after protracted inter-institutional negotiations. This article asks why the new control system took its final form. The negotiations as a game of control positions are analyzed and the course of the negotiations is traced through documents and interviews. Support is found for the article's hypotheses, but it is also the case that events in some respects went further than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lisbon Treaty introduces a distinction between legislative, delegated and implementation acts and thus represents a new approach to delegated decision-making in the EU. This will lead to a reform of the comitology system. Against this background this contribution takes stock. What do we know about the comitology system? Can the existing literature help us understand the post-Lisbon changes? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on comitology has largely ignored the European Commission's actual behaviour in the daily workings of the numerous comitology committees that were designed to control it. On the basis of survey data of Danish and Dutch representatives on nearly all comitology committees, this paper investigates the Commission's role in the system. We find that the Commission acts both as a mediator and as a policy advocate, but to varying degrees. We take a first step towards understanding this behaviour by an inspection of four arguments found in the literature on comitology and the Commission: the constraining or enabling impact of the comitology procedures; the institutional position of the responsible Directorate-General; the nature of the cases dealt with by the committees and, finally, the intensity of the member states' preferences in relation to the committees' cases. In comitology, each of these arguments shapes the mediating or the advocating behaviour of the Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two images exist of the day-to-day practice of the EU comitology system. The first claims that comitology is deliberation by policy experts in which informal norms, deliberation and good arguments matter more than economic interests and formal voting rules. The second image portrays comitology as an arena for intergovernmental bargaining designed by the Member States to control the Commission. The article systematically investigates these images based on survey evidence from a questionnaire to the Danish and Dutch national representatives on nearly all comitology committees in 2006. The evidence suggests that both images hold and that their relative importance is determined by the nature of the issues dealt with by the individual comitology committees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2–300 comitology committees monitor the EU Commission's use of delegated powers. Why should there be this unique and peculiar solution to a parliamentary control problem that is well known from all national political systems? This article argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the exact choice of comitology can only be explained by the actions of the Commission. The idea of comitology was introduced by the Commission, and it functioned as a focal point in the member states' negotiations on supranational administration in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The argument is substantiated in an analysis of the first uses of comitology within three widely different EU policy areas: agriculture, development aid, and customs policy. The general lesson is that the EU Commission can be an important informal agenda-setter in areas where it has no formal powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The partnership principle in EU cohesion policy was introduced in order to involve subnational authorities and interest organizations in policy formulation and implementation. In this article we examine how the member states have reacted to this call for a new way of making public policy. We argue that the multi-level governance literature and the critics of the multi-level governance framework have not examined implementation structures properly, but have focused on regional influence. We conduct a comparative analysis of the Dutch and Danish implementations of the European Social Fund and the European Regional Development Fund. Our findings show that when examining implementation structures it becomes clear that member states are in full control of the re-allocation of EU funds. They show that Denmark and The Netherlands have been able to absorb EU cohesion policy within already existing national implementation structures of labour market policies and regional development. One central theoretical implication of our study is that the focus of studies of any fundamental re-allocation of power resources in cohesion studies should comprise the entire network of implementation rather than the strategies of its individual component actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyse who controls the implementation of EU cohesion policy. The main argument is that EU control mechanisms are weak and that the goals formulated at the EU level are likely to be remoulded in the implementation process in order to suit the preferences of the implementing actors at the national level. In order to make this argument it is necessary to move beyond the traditional approach to EU cohesion policy, i.e. the multi-level governance model. I suggest the principal–agent framework as an alternative approach. An inspection of EU cohesion policy through the lenses of this approach uncovers serious implementation problems. The empirical relevance of this argument is demonstrated in a study of the implementation of a selected area of EU cohesion policy, the Urban Community Initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a critical assessment of an important contribution to the debate on institutional efficiency and inefficiency in European policy-making: the thesis on the ‘joint-decision trap’. This trap was identified by Fritz W. Scharpf, first in German federalism and later in policy-making in the European Union. The essay argues that joint-decision traps may be a much more prevalent phenomenon than envisaged by Scharpf. However, the essay demonstrates that joint-decision traps are not inherent to joint-decision systems. The basic argument of the essay is that the effects of joint-decision systems on public policy is contingent upon the central government's ability to threaten intergovernmental actors with exit. If this is possible, joint-decision systems turn into an asset. This argument is made on the basis of an analysis of intergovernmental relations in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and a comparison of the Scandinavian systems with those of France and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]