Case Studies and EU Politics: A Reply to Miklin

A recent article in West European Politics by Eric Miklin attempted to shed light on the decision-making process in the European Union. The argument presented was that individual ministerial ideological preferences can affect a government's bargaining position in the Council of the European Union. Miklin proposes that under certain conditions national ministers may enjoy substantial freedom. This brief reply identifies three main problems with Miklin's approach: a case selection bias, ministerial autonomy, and an examination of where decisions are made.     

The Contested Council: Conflict Dimensions of an Intergovernmental EU Institution

Recent research has tried to uncover the political space in which the Council of Ministers of the European Union decides. Rather than the left-right conflict or a cleavage between governments with national and supranational attitudes, this article shows that a redistributive dimension, decisively shapes the interactions in this most important legislative body of the European Union. In contrast to extant studies, we employ ex ante rather than ex post preference data and rely on correspondence analysis as a means to identify the underlying dimensions of contestation. The article concludes with an empirical investigation of how enlargement will affect the emerging political space within the European Union. Our quantitative analysis suggests that the gulf between net-contributors and net-receivers will further deepen.     

European Union enlargement: Power distribution implications of the new institutional arrangements

Abstract. It is argued that enlargement challenges institutional balances and in particular relative powers of national actors within the European Union (EU). This article concentrates on the impact of future enlargement (with the current negotiating 12 candidates) on power distribution in the Council of Ministers of the European Union and the European Parliament based on the decisions taken at the Nice Summit in December 1800. It uses the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices to evaluate past and emerging power distributions in both the Council and in the Parliament. A brief section on Turkey (the thirteenth, non-negotiating, official candidate) is included to evaluate its possible impact in the case of admission to the Union.     

Responsible Party Government in a World of Interdependence

This article opens up the closed model of the responsibility of a national government to its national electorate by adding constraints on its capacity to enact effective economic, national security and political policies. These constraints come from policy interdependence. The European Union exerts a denationalising influence through the Council, a multinational effect through the European Parliament, and the eurozone is designed as a transnational technocracy. Intergovernmental institutions spanning continents add further constraints. The result is a growing gap between the efforts of a national government to deliver outputs that match the preferences of voters and a reduction in the capacity of national electorates to hold accountable institutions outside their country that have a major impact on national outcomes. The conclusion considers three prospective possibilities: a growing frustration with a policy-irrelevant rotation of parties in office; institutional reform at the supranational level; and a learning process in which a recognition of the constraints of interdependence leads to a change in expectations.     

Interaction between States and Citizens in the Age of the Internet: "e-Government" in the United States, Britain, and the European Union

We examine the origins of the recent shift towards "e-government" in three cases: the United States, Britain, and the European Union. We set out three heuristic models of interaction between states and citizens that might underpin the practice of "e-government." Focusing on U.S., British, and European Union initiatives, we undertake a comparative analysis of the evolution of key policy statements on e-government reform in national (and supranational) government. We conclude that the democratic potential of the Internet has been marginalized as a result of the ways in which government use of such technology has been framed since the early 1990s. An executive-driven, "managerial" model of interaction has assumed dominance at the expense of "consultative" and "participatory" possibilities.     

Secrecy and the making of CFSP

Abstract

How can we understand the role of secrecy in the making of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)? This article analyses the nature of secrecy and questions some of the main assumptions surrounding the concept. In this respect, it argues that secrecy may be of functional necessity for policy-makers and actually compatible with good governance. Moreover, we must not put too much stock in transparency alone in that the relationship between secrecy and transparency is not zero-sum ? historically, transparency has sometimes been an instrument of control and domination. The article considers the case of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) to shed light on what kind of secrecy exists in the foreign policy area, and argues that this is mainly a combination of functional and compound secrecy.     

The Compound Machinery of Government: The Case of Seconded Officials in the European Commission

This article explores the compound machinery of government. Attention is directed toward decision making within the core executive of the European Union—the European Commission. The article studies seconded national civil servants (SNEs) hired on short‐term contracts. The analysis benefits from an original and rich body of surveys and interview data derived from current and former SNEs. The decision‐making dynamics of SNEs are shown to contain a compound mix of departmental, epistemic, and supranational dynamics. This study clearly demonstrates that the socializing power of the Commission is conditional and only partly sustained when SNEs exit the Commission. Any long‐lasting effect of socialization within European Union's executive machinery of government is largely absent. The compound decision‐making dynamics of SNEs are explained by (1) the organizational affiliations of SNEs, (2) the formal organization of the Commission apparatus, and (3) only partly by processes of resocialization of SNEs within the Commission.     

Does the UK Have Influence in the EU Legislative Process?

The UK has influenced some major EU policies, such as the creation of the single market and enlargement. But how influential are the UK government and British MEPs in the day‐to‐day EU legislative process? To answer this question, this article analyses recent data from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. The evidence is mixed. In the Council, in recent years the UK government has been outvoted more often than any other EU government, yet UK officials remain well connected ‘behind the scenes’. In the European Parliament, British MEPs are now more likely to be on the losing side than are the MEPs of any other member state, yet British MEPs still win key committee chairs and rapporteurships. The evidence suggests that if the UK votes to remain in the EU, Britain's political elites will need to re‐engage with Brussels politics if the UK is to avoid becoming further marginalised from mainstream EU politics.     

National interest versus the common good: The Presidency in European Council agenda setting

The European Council is an institution which brings together the Heads of State, or Governments of the European Union (EU) Member States. For the Presidency, preparing the agenda of European Council meetings involves a tension between loyalties. Existing research is divided over the question whether the Presidency pushes its domestic policy agenda on the EU level. Using empirical data on the Conclusions of European Council meetings, and national executive speeches presented annually in five Member States, this article investigates the relationship between the policy agendas of the EU and its constituent countries. It tests whether national issue attention of the Presidency holder dominates the European Council agenda. The findings suggest that having the Presidency does not provide a de facto institutional advantage for agenda setting power for any of the countries in the sample. The analysis points out that normative and political constrains limit the leeway of presiding Member States to push for domestic agenda preferences in the European Council.     

The European Council and The Council of the European Union: Shapers of a European Confederation

The European Council and the Council of the European Union playkey roles in the European Union. The European Council is largelyconcerned with system-steering, while the Council of the EUundertakes sectoral policymaking. What is common to these rolesis the balancing act carried out by both institutions. Bothhave to mediate the centripetal dynamics of integration, termedcooperative confederalism here, and the centrifugal dynamicswhich are found in the strongly entrenched territorial natureof power, centered on the member states. Using new institutionalistanalysis, the article illuminates different facets of the twoinstitutions1 functioning in mediating the two dynamics.     

Legitimacy through targeted transparency? Regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimate and accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with the democratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solution to increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulation regime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining it and complying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency‐based regulatory regimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as a legitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Do stakeholders perceive the transparency‐based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form of regulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency and proposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluate the legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374 stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The findings describe a transparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizens criticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register's performance as a transparency instrument. The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups about supranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benefits of transparency, but identify few organisation‐level benefits. Organisations that are policy insiders incur more transparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategies and does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in the Register's regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfect regulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support increased transparency and information disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’ participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountable and legitimate supranational lobbying.     

The Council: An Institutional Chameleon?

Council reform is a topic that has become a key issue in the wider discussion about reshaping the institutions of the European Union. This article explores five different images of the Council: as a partner of the Commission; as a club of governments; as a venue for competition and bargaining between governments and other political actors; as an arena for networked governance; and as a consortium for developing "transgovernmental" collaboration. It is conventional to examine the Council as both executive and legislative in character. More interesting, perhaps, is its evolving practice as a forum for experimentation.     

Judicial Europeanisation: The Case of Zambrano in Ireland

The Court of Justice of the European Union is an important motor of integration and is said to be particularly strong in those cases where the Council shows an inability to act. What is the relevance of the Court to social Europe? Europeanisation studies analyse how member states change due to European integration. Judicial Europeanisation is a topic that is under-explored in the literature. Using a case-study approach, this paper analyses the Zambrano case, one of the most notable recent cases of judicial activism of the CJEU with regard to EU citizenship rights. Although the literature often assumes that member states only reluctantly embrace the requirements of case law, the Irish government immediately obliged its administration to implement the required changes. Analysing this case in greater detail and comparing it to the responses of several other member states promises to shed some light on the under-explored question of how Europeanisation through case law proceeds, and what the Court may contribute to social Europe.     

Parliamentary questions and oversight in the European Union

Delegation in the European Union (EU) involves a series of principal‐agent problems, and the various chains of delegation involve voters, parties, parliaments, governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament. While the literature has focused on how government parties attempt to monitor EU affairs through committees in national parliaments and through Council committees at the EU level, much less is known about the strategies opposition parties use to reduce informational deficits regarding European issues. This article argues that the European Parliament (EP) offers opposition parties an arena to pursue executive oversight through the use of written parliamentary questions. Using a novel dataset on parliamentary questions in the EP, this article examines why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) ask questions of specific Commissioners. It transpires that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to ask questions of Commissioners. Questions provide these parties with inexpensive access to executive scrutiny. This finding has implications for the study of parliamentary delegation and party politics inside federal legislatures such as the EP.     

Roll call analysis of voting in the European Union Council of Ministers after the 2004 enlargement

Voting and coalitions in the Council of Ministers in the enlarged European Union are analysed for the period during which the EU had 25 Member States, based on Council's roll call records. In terms of frequency of voting in the Council, the new EU Member States did not differ from their older counterparts in any significant way. However, enlargement has had an impact on the Council interaction. A spatial roll call model shows that the Council's political space is comprised of two main dimensions. The first reflects the north-south cleavage found in the Council even before the 2004 enlargement, while the second is related to enlargement and indicates a cleavage between the new and old Member States. Thus in the enlarged Union, the north-south dimension is replaced by a north-south-east pattern.     

The 2004 Greek Election: PASOK's Monopoly Ends

What determines a government's position inside the Council of the European Union? This article takes up recent arguments according to which Council decision-making is driven not only by ‘objective’ national interests but also by the ideological preferences of the member states' representatives. On the basis of a study of Germany, Austria and Sweden and their positions with regard to the Services Directive, it seeks to advance the debate by specifying the conditions under which ideological preferences are more likely to dominate. Applying a principal–agent model it is argued that the relative impact of ideological preferences crucially depends on the relationship between the ministers sitting in the Council and the governing parties at the national level: the less a minister is exposed to parliamentary and intra-governmental control, the more a country's position is susceptible to the ideological preferences of the minister.     

25 Years of Transparency Research: Evidence and Future Directions

This article synthesizes the cross‐disciplinary literature on government transparency. It systematically reviews research addressing the topic of government transparency published between 1990 and 2015. The review uses 187 studies to address three questions: (1) What forms of transparency has the literature identified? (2) What outcomes does the literature attribute to transparency? and (3) How successful is transparency in achieving those goals? In addressing these questions, the authors review six interrelated types of transparency and nine governance‐ and citizen‐related outcomes of transparency. Based on the findings of the analysis, the authors outline an agenda for future research on government transparency and its effects that calls for more systematically investigating the ways in which contextual conditions shape transparency outcomes, replicating studies with varying methodologies, investigating transparency in neglected countries, and paying greater attention to understudied claims of transparency such as improved decision making and management.     

Out of tune or well tempered? How competition agencies direct the orchestrating state

This article analyzes the impact competition agencies have on the orchestrating role of states in domestic private regulation. I argue that these agencies can significantly affect interactions in the governance triangle through the way they apply a “logic of the market” to evaluate agreements between firms. The regulatory framework of European Union competition law has increasingly constrained the ability of firms to take into account broader interests when making agreements to foster social objectives. This logic of the market clashes with the ever‐increasing emphasis governments place on enabling firms to enter into such agreements. I analyze this tension through a case study of a pact of Dutch retailers to collectively introduce higher animal welfare standards for poultry. Using regulatory network analysis I trace the governance interactions between the governance triangle on the one hand (government, non‐governmental organizations, and firms), and the Dutch competition authority, Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM) and the European Commission on the other hand. Attempts by the Dutch government to instruct the ACM to be more lenient toward private regulation were blocked twice by the European Commission. As a result, the Dutch government abandoned private regulation as the preferred mode and proposed a bottom‐up process that would generate public regulation as a way to avoid conflict with competition policy. I argue that paradoxically enough the intervention of these non‐majoritarian competition agencies against the “will” of the governance triangle has potentially increased the effectiveness and legitimacy of orchestration processes.     

Making the most of the best: Formulating a knowledge management strategy for a government advisory body

‘Well, there seems to be a growing consensus among companies doing knowledge management that the correct focus should be neither on the individual nor the enterprise, but instead on some grouping of people who share common context, stories and passion, around a subject’ (Larry Prusak).¹ What do you get when some 20 people meet every three or four months, each one at the top of their respective fields and from different organisations and with different backgrounds, in different cities around Australia? In the case of the Family Law Council you get scintillating intellectual pyrotechnics, sharing of insights and even, in a typically understated Australian way, passion. The Family Law Council (the Council) is a government advisory body. Advisory bodies have two primary functions: to provide expert and representative advice in an increasingly specialised and complex social environment; and to open up channels of communication between government and the people (Hughes 1995). This article examines how the tools and analytical techniques of knowledge management (KM) can add value to the two primary functions of the Council. Drawing on the conceptual framework of KM, and on the basis that the Council forms a knowledge system, this article will examine the workings of the Council. It will look at its statutory role, environmental background and logistics, in order to propose a KM strategy adapted to its specific circumstances. And it will, where appropriate, illustrate points with discussions based on methodologies and case studies from the flourishing academic field of KM.     

A Case of Strange Bedfellows in the EU: An Institutional Perspective on the French–Swedish Cooperation on Alcohol Control

Some relationships in modern politics may intuitively be more difficult to understand than others. This article deals with what might be referred to as a case of strange bedfellows, i.e. the French–Swedish cooperation on alcohol control in the European Union (EU). The French government has actively supported the Swedish government on several occasions in discussions and disputes over alcohol control policy issues at the EU level, and this article presents and discusses three different interpretations of this support. It is concluded that, rather than reflecting current economic calculations or matching policies, the French support should be viewed in relation to an institutional perspective emphasising the importance of historical paths and inefficient histories.