BICAMERALISM OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: DECISION-MAKING IN THE CONCILIATION COMMITTEE

Abstract

The conciliation committee is the ultimate inter-cameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary (former codecision) legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? Are the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on an equal footing? Upon a closer examination, the institutional set-up of the committee is bias in favour of the Council. The present research investigates under which conditions the European Parliament may be more successful in conciliation bargaining, by three integrating analyses. First, through Wordfish I conduct quantitative text analysis estimating the similarity between the documents of almost all the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. This evidence suggests that, in almost seventy per cent of times, the final agreement is more similar to the position of the Council. As expected, the Parliament has been more successful after the reform of the Treaty of Amsterdam and in dossiers where the Council decides by qualified majority voting. The Parliament also benefits if the rapporteur comes from a large party because a veto threat is more easily executable. In line with König et al. (2007), the support from the Commission as well as when national administrations are more involved in implementation than the Commission are crucial to parliamentary success. Second, a qualitative expert survey provides an in-depth contribution to the variables affecting legislative outcome for a broad array of cases. The discussions engaged key actors, both from the Council and Parliament, about several dossiers reached the conciliation. The qualitative analysis motivates some of the hypotheses confirmed by the quantitative empirical tests. It investigates the causal mechanism of the rapporteur's party affiliation, the membership length of the Council president and the Commission's role, while the personality of the relays actors and the relationship of the assembly with the public opinion, which were not analysed quantitatively, are likely to exert constraints on parliamentarians in finding an agreement or raising the disagreement value they attach to dossiers. Finally, after developing a formal model of conciliation under incomplete information, I select the case of the Telecom Package as analytic narrative to explain how Parliament may extract more concessions from the member states if it manipulates the Council's believe on its own type.