Suchergebnisse

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.

INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS ARE TAKEN BY EACH INDIVIDUAL FOR HIMSELF (regardless of whether he is inner- or other-directed). Group decisions imply that decisions are taken by a 'concrete' group, i.e. a face-to-face interacting number of individuals which may thus be said to share (partake) such decisions. Collective decisions are hardly amenable to a precise definition; but they are generally understood to mean decisions taken by the 'many'. We then havecollectivized decisions. Collective and collectivized decisions may be said to share the property of not being, in any meaningful sense, individual decisions. Even so, collectivized decisions are very different from all the others. Individual, group, and collective decisions all make reference to an actor, to who makes the decision. Collectivized decisions are, instead, decisions that apply to, and are enforced upon, a collectivity regardless of whether they are taken by the one, the few, or the many. The defining criterion no longer iswhomakes the decision, but itsscope: whoever does the decidingdecides or all.

peer-reviewed ; This research is about the Committee of the Regions advisory role and the influence of its Opinion in the EU's decision-making process, particularly in the co-decision procedure. For this purpose, this study attempts to answer two research questions. The first one refers to the potential of the CoR to influence the legislative institutions considering its position in the EU's interinstitutional framework. In this part, what is of interest is the development of the CoR's formal and informal relations with the EU's institutions and the implications for its advisory role. The second research question refers to how and under which conditions the CoR influences the outcome of the co-decision procedure. To answer this part of the research a quantitative analysis is provided as an attempt to measure the impact of the amendments proposed by the CoR in its Opinions under co-decision and to examine possible explanations for its varying degree of influence. The results of this research show, that the CoR holds an important position within the EU's institutional setting. The CoR exploits this position by developing strong relations especially with the Commission and the European Parliament. The relationship of the CoR with the Commission has been formalised since the mid-1990s in the adoption of cooperation agreements. In these cooperation agreements, the Commission provides for more avenues for the CoR to participate in the decision-making process by requesting for its Opinion in instances where it is not required by the Treaty. Likewise, since 2014 the EP has formalised its relationship with the CoR with their own cooperation agreement with the CoR. The outcome of the quantitative analysis confirms, that the CoR has limited influence through its formal Opinion under co-decision. However, the CoR's advisory role should not be neglected completely, as the explanatory analysis shows that the CoR can influence the co-decision procedure when it issues its Opinion early in the decision-making process and in ...

Each of us makes a number of decisions, from the less important to those with
far-reaching consequences. As members of different groups, we are also actors
of group decision making. In order to make a rational decision, a
choice-making procedure must satisfy a number of assumptions (conditions) of
rationality. In addition, when it comes to group decisions, those procedures
should also be ?fair.? However, it is not possible to define a procedure of
choice-making that would transform individual orders of alternatives based on
preferences of perfectly rational individuals into a single social order and
still meet conditions of rationality and ethics. The theory of deliberative
democracy appeared in response to the impossibility of Social Choice theory.
The basic assumption of deliberative democracy is that individuals adjust
their preferences taking into account interests of the community. They are
open for discussion with other group members and are willing to change their
attitudes in order to achieve common interests. Ideally, group members come
to an agreement during public discussion (deliberation). Still, this concept
cannot completely over?come all the difficulties posed by the theory of
social choice. Specifically, there is no solution for strategic and
manipulative behavior of individuals. Also, the concept of deliberative
democracy faces certain problems particular to this approach, such as, to
name but a few, problems with the establishment of equality of participants
in the debate and their motivation, as well as problems with the organization
of public hearings.