Unity and conflict: Explaining financial industry lobbying success in European Union public consultations

This article examines the contingent nature of financial industry lobbying power in the context of the policy formation stage of six European Commission regulatory proposals. I argue that lobbying success is a function of how well finance is able to speak with a unified voice. Building on existing studies, I examine industry unity as explicit preference alignment between actors but also in terms of actors abstaining from stating preferences. Staying silent on an issue sends signals to policymakers about issue saliency and industry support. Using a novel dataset derived from document coding and interviews, I examine the impact of industry unity on lobbying success in shaping six financial regulatory proposals in the context of the European Union. My findings show that lobbying success is partially contingent on the extent to which finance is united behind a common position. Critically, however, lobbying success is also related to the nature of that position, whether supporting the proposal or whether in favor of strengthening or weakening regulatory stringency.     

Striking a pose: Transparency and position taking in the Council of the European Union

In recent years, transparency (or the lack thereof) has become a central concern of the European Union and its attempts to increase the democratic legitimacy of the legislative decision‐making process. The claim regularly made is that increasing transparency increases the potential for holding decision makers to account. This study investigates the manner in which transparency in the decision‐making process affects the policy positions taken by negotiators at the outset of negotiations. The findings presented suggest that increasing transparency tends to lead to polarisation of negotiations, with negotiators taking more extreme positions when they know that their positions can be observed by outside parties. The implication of this result is that advocates of transparency should be aware that there is an inherent trade‐off between increasing transparency, on the one hand, and increasing the incentives to grandstand during negotiations, on the other.     

Reconceptualizing European Union regulatory networks: A response to Blauberger and Rittberger

This article responds to Michael Blauberger and Berthold Rittberger's article “Conceptualizing and theorizing EU regulatory networks,” published in Regulation & Governance in 2015. Blauberger and Rittberger challenged our previous work on the politics of Eurocracy, disputing our argument that political considerations, not functional ones, explain the choice of bureaucratic structure in the European Union (EU). Blauberger and Rittberger suggest that functional considerations do indeed explain why policymakers sometimes prefer governance through European Regulatory Networks rather than through more centralized EU agencies, and argue that we have misunderstood the preferences of EU legislative principals. In this article, we argue that there are significant flaws in Blauberger and Rittberger's analysis on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We show that a proper interpretation of developments in both telecoms and competition lends support to our theoretical claims and not those offered by Blauberger and Rittberger.     

Orchestrating sustainability: The case of European Union biofuel governance

This article provides an empirical analysis of orchestration – that is, the initiation, support, and embracement of private governance arrangements through public regulators – in the field of European Union biofuel governance. It examines the emerging sustainability regime and shows that orchestration has been extensively practiced. Regulators in the European Union have used a range of directive and facilitative measures to initiate and support private biofuel certification schemes and to incorporate them in their regulatory frameworks. This has given rise to a hybrid regime in which public and private approaches are closely intertwined. Discussing the benefits and complications of engaging with private biofuel sustainability governance, the article's findings point to a partial failure of orchestration in this policy area.     

Democratic legitimacy in regional economic organizations: the European Union in comparative perspective

Regional organizations have been widely criticized for lacking democratic legitimacy, but these criticisms have been rather ad hoc, concerned with single case studies and reliant on unclear standards or metrics. Are all organizations similarly deficient? And how does the European Union (EU), the target par excellence of the criticisms, fare in comparative perspective? In this paper, we take a first step towards answering these questions by leveraging the rich debate on the EU to identify several institutional dimensions of democratic legitimacy and operationalizing them for comparative analysis. We then investigate the most important regional economic organizations (REOs) in the world. Our findings are three-fold: (i) there is systematic variation across REOs, with a group doing rather well, one mixed, and one poorly; (ii) procedural dimensions fare better than those related to representation or local self-determination; (iii) no organization exhibits or lacks legitimacy in all dimensions. These results qualify the perception that democratic legitimacy deficits are indiscriminately pervasive and indicate that the EU belongs to the most democratically legitimate group.     

Experimentalist governance in the European Union: A commentary

Sabel and Zeitlin's Experimentalist Governance offers an insight into European governance in those cases where the EU institutions do not have clear competence and where member states are not prepared to accept a unified policy on a problem at hand. Experimentalist Governance identifies four steps of action: agree on common goals, have lower levels propose ways to meet goals, then report on their meeting of goals, and, finally, periodically reevaluate the review procedures. By looking at the developments in EU policymaking through the lens of experimentalist governance (EG), one obtains an appreciation of how goals might be achieved that would otherwise not likely have been achieved through the community method. Sabel and Zeitlin highlight how EG can be effective in obtaining results, integrating peers, and incorporating deliberation, and offer a different way to deal with accountability and legitimacy. This article closes by taking the next step, namely, asking what challenges EG poses to democratic processes.     

Good governance and differentiated integration: Graded membership in the European Union

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organisational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyses organisational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in‐between grades of membership. It describes how the EU's system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of ‘good governance’. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries.     

Banking supervision and the politics of verification: the 2014 stress test in the European Banking Union

The statistical methodology known in financial terminology as ‘stress testing’ was used by the European Central Bank in 2014 in order to assess the solidity of the banks in the eurozone. This audit process is analysed here as a problem of truth production or ‘veridiction’ in the sense developed by Michel Foucault in his 1978–1979 lectures at the Collège de France. In order to prove effective, the stress test had to deliver knowledge on banks, objectified and actionable at once, but also controlled by the idea of avoiding ‘market panic’. This epistemological dilemma is at the core of the politics of verification, which consists in the distribution of restraint and responsibility between non-risky and risky banks. This qualitative investigation is focused on France and is based on interviews with relevant policy actors and documentary analysis.     

The Contingent Diffusion of Parliamentary Oversight Institutions in the European Union

What explains the variation in institutional adaptation of national parliaments to European integration? Whereas the existing literature has mainly focused on domestic conditions, this article explains institutional adaptation to integration by focusing on inter‐parliamentary diffusion. The argument draws on ‘learning’ mechanisms of diffusion on the demand side and on ‘emulation’ mechanisms on the supply side. Parliamentary demand for external inspiration is related to uncertainty about functional oversight institutions, and the selection of sources to perceptions of similarity and success. Demand arises in new European Union member parliaments and young democracies that then turn towards culturally alike countries and old democracies. Using spatial econometrics, support is demonstrated for the argument in the article while ruling out alternative diffusion mechanisms such as spatial proximity and learning from Scandinavian frontrunners once links along cultural similarity and democratic experience are controlled for. The results underline the limits of the ‘isolated polity’ approach in the comparative study of institutions in Europe's closely integrated political system, while also showing that, even in this favourable environment, diffusion pathways are contingent on the mechanisms generating demand among policy makers and shaping their selection of sources for external information.     

Understanding voluntary program performance: Introducing the diffusion network perspective

Voluntary programs have rapidly become a means for the public, private, and third sectors to regulate and govern complex societal problems. Following the rapid and widespread emergence of these programs, scholars have been active in mapping, exploring, and interrogating their design and performance. Considerable advances have been made in describing program design and context conditions, and the actors involved in the voluntary program that relate to program performance. Less is known, however, about how these conditions affect program performance. Starting with one of the dominant theories on voluntary programs, the club theory perspective, this article seeks to understand how different program design conditions interact to affect the performance of 26 voluntary programs for low carbon building and city development in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Applying qualitative comparative analysis, the study finds that the club theory perspective has limited explanatory power for this specific set of cases. Iterative rounds of analysis indicate that a diffusion network perspective is the best complementary perspective for explaining the performance of this set of programs. The article concludes that, in situations of a non‐homogeneous market of voluntary program participants, a focus on the programs’ diffusion networks helps to explain their performance. This has implications for the design and implementation of such programs.     

Balancing experimentalist and hierarchical governance in European Union electricity and telecommunications regulation: A matter of degrees

While the widespread diffusion of experimentalism across sectors and polities is well documented, less is known about the extent of the shift to this non‐hierarchical form of governance, which continues to coexist with traditional hierarchical governance and involves more inclusive rulemaking and revision based on review of alternative implementation experiences. By comparing and process‐tracing electricity and telecommunications regulation in the European Union, we find diversity in experimentalism over time and across two sectors often considered similar. We explain varying degrees of experimentalism with strategic uncertainty and the constellation of preferences, which we label “de facto polyarchy.” Thus, we confirm the emphasis on uncertainty documented in the experimentalist literature, while addressing a conventional critique by also highlighting the relevance of “politics.” Moreover, while corroborating the common spread of experimentalism, we suggest that an analytical framework based on ideal types offers the best route forward to develop comparative analysis of experimentalism and non‐hierarchical forms of governance more broadly.     

From capacity to sovereignty: Legislative politics and differentiated integration in the European Union

The literature suggests that legislative politics among European Union Member States is characterised by economic exchanges, and constrained by the social norms of a European community of legislators. Both views draw a clear line between the legislative process and the conflicts over sovereignty that have left their mark on treaty making and European public opinion since the 1990s. This article suggests revisiting this view, based on an analysis of why Member States have opted out of legislation from the 1970s to today. It argues that differentiation, while once a response to capacity problems of relatively poor countries, has recently become driven by sovereignty concerns of the Union's wealthy and nationally oriented Members that oppose the EU's intrusion into core state powers. The article presents evidence for the impact on legislative outcomes of factors so far thought not to matter. The results indicate greater European‐level legislative responsiveness towards national sovereignty demands than previously recognised. They underline that the nature of European politics has been changing with the EU's push into core state powers.     

Across time and space: Explaining variation in news coverage of the European Union

News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This study investigates explanations for cross‐national and over‐time variation in news media coverage of EU affairs drawing on large‐scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in the EU‐15 (1999), EU‐25 (2004) and EU‐27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament (EP) elections. The analyses focus in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to media characteristics and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during EP election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU in combination with overall more negative positions towards the EU, the more visible the news. Also, increases in EU news visibility from one election to the next and the Europeanness of the news are determined by a country's elite positions. The findings are discussed in light of the EU's alleged communication deficit.     

When soft regulation is not enough: The integrated pollution prevention and control directive of the European Union

Recent debates regarding the effectiveness of regulatory policymaking in the European Union (EU) focus on the merits of soft, non-binding forms of regulation between public and private actors. The emergence of less coercive forms of regulation is analyzed as a response to powerful functional pressures emanating from the complexity of regulatory issues, as well as the need to secure flexibility and adaptability of regulation to distinctive territorial economic, environmental, administrative, and social conditions. In this article we empirically assess the above normative claims regarding the effectiveness of soft regulation vis-à-vis uniformly binding legislation. We draw on an exploratory investigation of the application of the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive of the EU in four countries. Our study reveals that effectiveness in the application of soft policy instruments is largely contingent upon strong cognitive, material, and political capacities of both state regulators and industrial actors involved in regulatory policymaking. In the absence of those conditions, the application of soft, legally non-binding regulation may lead to adverse effects, such as non-compliance and the “hollowing out” of the systems of environmental permits to industry. In the medium term, such developments can undermine the normative authority of the EU.     

JISB Interview: The European Union and Statebuilding in the Western Balkans

Christopher Bickerton and David Chandler interviewed Paddy Ashdown, international High Representative and EU Special Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, May 2002–January 2006, at the House of Lords, 5 July 2006. He is currently working on a book distilling the lessons of his experience of statebuilding in the region.     

Explaining variation and change in supervisory confidentiality in the European Union

Abstract

Some European Union member states’ financial regulators choose to make some of the data they routinely collect on individual banks publicly available. Others treat this data as confidential. What explains this difference? This paper considers the possible effects of crises, path-dependent legal institutions, and the design of deposit insurance schemes. At the national level, the paper focuses on contrasting German and Dutch cases. After the recent economic crisis, the Dutch released more data while the German authorities maintained strict confidentiality rules. The design of deposit insurance schemes provides a key reason why the level of secrecy varies, with the Dutch move from an ex post to an ex ante scheme where the government served as the ultimate backstop leading to questions about the accounts of individual banks while the German system favoured continued secrecy. The paper also describes the level of transparency at the EU level. Multilevel legal restrictions and bureaucratic capacity tilt EU banking union practices towards member states that treat financial supervisory data as confidential.     

Fiscal Decentralization Policies in the EU: A Comparative Analysis through a Club Convergence Analysis

Abstract

We study the degree of convergence or divergence in fiscal decentralization in the European Union over the period 1995–2015 using a club convergence approach. First, we analyze non-central expenditure and revenue as percentages of GDP, of total expenditure and of total revenue. The results for the EU-15 countries indicate some clustering, with three clubs formed when using GDP and four to five when using total revenue or expenditure. Second, we study the gap between expenditure and revenue as a proxy of fiscal responsibility. This results in three and two clubs respectively, with Denmark as the divergent country with the highest gap. Finally, we analyze potential unions of clubs and transitions. We also interpret our results taking into account variables found in the literature as determinants of fiscal decentralization. These results show how European countries are quite heterogeneous in terms of fiscal federalism and decentralization, with greater convergence in fiscal responsibility than in the other magnitudes.