Large and small; old and new

This chapter assesses the relative power of the member states in the Council. Part of this assessment considers the relative power of large and small member states. Small states may have considerable power relative to large states in the European Union (EU). Small states have the same voting power as large states when the Council must adopt a legislative proposal by unanimity. In addition, even in policy areas where qualified majority voting (QMV) applies, small states have more power than their formal voting weights imply (e.g., Bunse et al. 2005). However, many observers hold the view that large states dominate the small in the EU. A realist view of EU decision-making attributes greater power to the larger states (e.g., Pedersen 1998). Even researchers who recognize that small states have considerable weight in the decision-making process also note that the large generally have more power than the small (e.g., Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 2006: 252).

What is the relative power of old and new member states? The answer to this question is partly conflated with the assessment of large and small states’ relative power, because most of the new member states are small. In addition to their small size, new member states face the challenge of adapting to, and integrating into, the EU’s system of decision-making. The process through which policy demands are transformed into decision outcomes is defined by informal bargaining. To participate effectively in such informal processes, state representatives need strong relationships with representatives of other states. Such relationships take time to form. Consequently, new member states may be at a disadvantage to old members, at least in the period soon after their accession. It has been suggested that new member states have not had a marked influence on decision outcomes (Goetz 2005: 254), which may indicate that they have less power than the old members.

The previous chapters examined the inputs, processes and outputs of the political system of the European Union (EU) with theories and methods of modern political science. Each chapter focused on an important aspect of the political system. It is now time to bring together the main findings and consider their implications. The three sections of this chapter summarize the main findings and dwell on their implications for three areas of knowledge regarding EU politics: enlargement, the democratic deficit and proposals for improving how the EU works.

Continuity and change in European Union decision-making since enlargement

There has been more continuity since the main 2004 enlargement than some observers and practitioners feared there would be. Three defining characteristics of the political system that helped make the EU successful have endured. First, inputs are diverse. Part I of this book examined inputs in the form of political actors’ policy demands regarding controversies raised by legislative proposals. There are only weak structures in these policy demands. This means that two member states that disagree with each other on one controversy are likely to agree on another controversy, even on a related matter. Variation in political actors’ policy demands is central to pluralist democratic theory (Dahl 1989: 251–4). According to pluralist theory, decisions are not controlled by a powerful elite group of actors with similar policy preferences on most of the important issues dealt with in the political system. Instead, different groups of actors share similar preferences depending on the issue at stake.

From inputs to outputs

How are diverse policy positions transformed into decision outcomes? This chapter examines the extent to which different theories accurately predict decision outcomes in the cases selected. Chapter 1 summarized the formal decision-making rules in the Treaty of the European Union (EU) that structure the decision-making process, such as the Commission’s right to initiate proposals, voting procedures in the Council and the involvement of the European Parliament (EP). Such formalities are at best the start of an answer to the above research question. To assess the impact of formal decision-making rules, we will identify the implications of those rules for decision outcomes, given the policy demands made on each controversy. The analysis will also consider alternative accounts of the decision-making process that attribute less importance to the formal rules, and that instead focus on informal bargaining among political actors.

This chapter uses a modelling approach to compare the relevance of different explanations of the EU’s decision-making process. Each explanation is specified in such detail that it makes specific predictions of what the decision outcomes will be given the distributions of actors’ initial policy positions on the controversial issues. This approach allows the analysis to compare the accuracy of different explanatory models’ predictions of decision outcomes. The analysis also identifies the extent to which alternative models differ from each other in their predictions of decision outcomes.

Supranationalism versus intergovernmentalism

This chapter answers the question ‘who has power in the European Union (EU)?’ by assessing the power of the Commission, European Parliament (EP) and Council relative to each other. During the process that transforms policy demands into decision outcomes, actors attempt to influence each other so that their policy demands are incorporated into outcomes as much as possible. Actors may differ from each other in their potential to exert such influence; in other words, they may differ in power. Researchers and practitioners express a wide range of views on the distribution of power among the Commission, EP and Council. The impact of EU enlargement on the distribution of power among these three institutions is also uncertain.

A classic definition of power that gives an appropriate point of departure for this chapter is that it is the potential a person or group has ‘to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others’ (Weber 2007/1914: 247). This simple definition holds a number of insights that are highlighted by later definitions and discussions of power. First, Weber’s definition implies that the focus of power is on influencing ‘social’ or collective actions. In the context of the legislative process, this implies that the focus of power is on influencing the contents of legislative acts. Influencing other actors may be an important means to the end of influencing the contents of legislative acts, but this is not always necessary. By contrast, Dahl’s often-cited definition of power focuses on interactions between actors, rather than outcomes: actor ‘A has power over [actor] B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’ (Dahl 1957: 203). Depending on the decision rule, it is not always necessary for actor A to convince B to change its behaviour for A to influence decision outcomes. For instance, under the co-decision procedure, the Council and EP could in principle change the legislative proposal and adopt an act that the Commission does not support. Therefore, it is not necessary for the Council and EP to change the Commission’s behaviour to influence the decision outcome.

A supranational technocrat, a party political ideologue or a multinational?

This chapter examines the European Commission’s policy positions in more detail. The main explanatory question is the following: What factors explain variation in the Commission’s policy positions? In answering this question, this chapter explores the effects of characteristics of the commissioners who were responsible for formulating the Commission’s positions on each controversy. This chapter examines the effects of commissioners’ ideological, party political and national affiliations.

The Commission’s policy positions are particularly important in the legislative process of the European Union (EU), not least because the Commission has an effective monopoly on the introduction of legislative proposals. Although the Commission cannot refuse to introduce a legislative proposal if requested to do so by the Council or European Parliament (EP), neither of these other bodies can determine the contents of the proposal (Crombez et al. 2006: 331). The fact that the Commission formulates and introduces legislative proposals gives it the potential to exert considerable influence on decision outcomes. The EU’s rules of procedure stipulate that the Council can only amend the Commission’s proposal unanimously when the consultation procedure applies. Potentially at least, this means that the Commission can use the rules of procedure to ensure that decision outcomes are a close as possible to its policy preferences. We will examine this agenda-setting power in more detail in Chapter 7.

Applying the spatial model of politics to legislative decision-making in the European Union

The modern conception of politics is spatial. We think about political views that we agree with as close to our own, and views that differ from ours as further away. When we think of changes in the policy stances of political parties, it is common to think of parties moving to the left or to the right of the main ideological dimension that characterizes politics in our national contexts. Thinking about politics in terms of space has been with us for a long time. Thomas Carlyle’s account of the French National Constituent Assembly in July 1789, which was established after the French Revolution, describes a consistent ordering in the plethora of deputies’ views (Carlyle 1871: 192, cited in Benoit and Laver 2006: 16). He observed a consistency between the physical location of deputies to the right or left of the president and their positions on the major issues of the day, the Revolution and the status of the aristocracy in France. The use of the terms Right and Left to denote Conservative and Liberal forces, as well as the more general notion of political difference as distance, has pervaded popular and academic writing about politics throughout the world until today.

Political scientists have systematized this spatial conception of politics; I will refer to this systematic conception as the spatial model of politics. Hotelling (1929) was one of the first to formulate a spatial model that could be applied to politics. In passing, he noted that his model of shopkeepers’ decisions regarding product prices and shop location on a street could be applied to politics (54–5). In particular, he drew an analogy between the physical clustering of shops a short distance from each other on a street and the convergence of policy stances taken by the Democrats and Republicans of his home country, the United States, at that time. However, it was not until Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) and Black’s The Theory of Committees and Elections (1958) that the analytical power of the spatial model of politics became apparent. Today, the spatial model is at least implicit in most research that tries to explain aspects of real-world politics.

Member states’ policy preferences and positions

This chapter explains variation in member states’ policy positions. In Chapter 2 (Section 2.5) I pointed out that states’ policy positions are conceptually distinct from their policy preferences. Policy positions, as defined and measured in the present study, are the policies that state representatives support at the outset of the negotiations; policy positions are therefore overt behaviour. By contrast, preferences are hidden and may or may not correspond to behavioural expressions. When explaining variation in states’ policy positions, this chapter’s point of departure is the proposition that these positions reflect states’ underlying preferences, which are defined by their national economic and political attributes. This point of departure agrees with some of the core assumptions of liberal international relations theory: in particular the core assumption that ‘[s]tates … represent some subset of domestic society, on the basis of whose interests state officials define state preferences and act purposefully in world politics’, and that ‘what states want is the primary determinant of what they do’ (Moravcsik 1997: 518, 521). Similarly, Achen (2006a: 121) also suggests that states’ preferences are readily observable in their policy positions: ‘An actor’s “most preferred point” is a clear idea and relatively easy to measure.’

The proposition that states’ policy positions reflect underlying economic and political attributes is challengeable, even within the framework of liberal international relations theory. Another core assumption of liberal international relations theory is that ‘the configuration of interdependent state preferences determines state behavior’ (Moravcsik 1997: 520). This means that ‘the expected behavior of any single state … reflect[s] not simply its own preferences, but the configuration of preferences of all states linked by patterns of significant policy interdependence’ (523). European Union (EU) member states certainly are linked to each other in ‘patterns of significant policy interdependence’. Research on policy networks among member states concurs that state officials often attempt to coordinate their policy positions with officials in other states (Naurin and Lindahl 2008). This may have the effect of blurring the impact of states’ economic and political attributes on their policy positions.

This chapter describes the inputs into the legislative process. These inputs consist of the policy demands made by the main actors – the Commission, the European Parliament (EP) and member states’ representatives in the Council – on controversies raised by legislative proposals. The following three descriptive questions are addressed in this chapter:

1. To what extent are there patterns in the alignments of actors’ policy positions across a range of controversies?

2. To the extent that these patterns exist, what are they?

3. Do these patterns tend to emerge on particular types of controversies?

Before attempting to explain a phenomenon, which Chapters 4–6 do with respect to different actors’ policy demands, it is necessary to describe it systematically. With the benefit of good description, the explanatory analysis can focus on the most salient features of actors’ policy positions. Chapters 4–6 are based on some key insights from the present chapter. This chapter identifies a number of interesting patterns in the alignments of actors’ policy positions, but the main descriptive finding is that actors’ positions vary considerably across different controversial issues. This is true of variation in the positions of the two supranational actors, the Commission and EP, and of the positions of member states’ representatives.

Delegating discretion to resolve controversy

Decision outcomes differ from each other in the extent to which they specify the details of policies to be followed by implementers. Some decision outcomes contain detailed rules that give implementers little or no opportunity to interpret decisions in different ways. Other decision outcomes delegate considerable room for manoeuvre to implementers. In this chapter, a decision outcome is said to delegate discretion to an implementer if the implementer can take one of two or more policy actions and still comply with the law of which the decision outcome is part.

In most political systems, decision makers delegate at least some discretionary power to implementers (e.g., Hawkins et al. 2006). Decision makers often argue that this is appropriate, because implementers can use technical knowledge that decision makers lack to fill in the details of policies. Moreover, implementers with discretionary power can react dynamically to unforeseen developments within the same general policy framework set by their political masters. The danger of delegating discretionary power to implementers is that implementers may carry out policies that are not in line with decision makers’ preferences, behaviour known as ‘bureaucratic drift’. If implementers have more information about policies and their effects than decision makers, it may be difficult for decision makers to detect and sanction policy drift. Consequently, in political systems around the world, decision makers must balance the costs and benefits of delegating discretionary power to implementers when formulating decision outcomes.

Diversity and controversy in the European Union

Decision makers in the European Union (EU) constantly disagree with one another, yet they usually find ways of resolving their disagreements by taking decisions. These decisions have significant and sometimes unwelcome consequences for citizens. Member states vehemently disagreed on important institutional reforms set out in the Lisbon Treaty that came into force in December 2009. EU member states are diverse in terms of their population sizes. As a result, they have different views on the appropriate weighting of large and small states in the voting system of the Council of Ministers where countries are represented. This controversial issue was raised in the Constitutional Convention that was charged with designing a new set of rules for governing the EU. Despite the long discussions held in the Constitutional Convention between February 2002 and July 2003, talks among member states’ governments collapsed on this issue in December 2003. Representatives of Poland and Spain were among those who wanted to keep the existing rules that gave substantial voting weights to small and medium-sized member states. The French and German governments were among those in favour of reform that would give more voting power to large states. The disagreement was resolved with an amended version of the Franco-German proposal that made some concessions to meet the concerns of smaller countries. This deal was set out in the constitution signed by EU leaders in Rome in October 2004.

But this controversy re-emerged after French and Dutch voters rejected the constitution in national referendums in May and June 2005. A period of reflection followed during the next 18 months. Then the German government called for a resumption of the institutional reform process. Under the stewardship of the German government, the constitution was repackaged as a treaty that contained most of the same reforms, but dispensed with the symbols of a constitution such as the flag and anthem. The advantage of the treaty form from the perspective of EU leaders was that it did not legally require a referendum in most member states. During this repackaging of the constitution as a treaty, the Polish government argued that the reform of member states’ voting rights should be revisited. Tensions rose as the Polish prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accused Germany of trying to dominate its smaller neighbours, and recalled that Germany had done so violently in Europe’s troubled past. The Czech government was sympathetic to the Polish argument, but most other member states were reluctant to revisit the issue. The controversy was resolved by revising the proposed voting system again. EU leaders postponed the new system of voting until 2014, introduced a new transition period until 2017 and introduced a new power of delay for minorities of states that were outvoted on issues of national interest. After a marathon round of talks in which this and other controversies were resolved, the late Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, said ‘the one who wins in these kinds of situations is the one with the strongest nerves’. The treaty was then signed by EU leaders in Lisbon in December 2007, and became known as the Lisbon Treaty.

Winners and losers with respect to decision outcomes

To what extent are there differences among actors in the congruence between their policy positions and decision outcomes across a broad range of controversial issues? When the decision-making process transforms diverse and competing policy demands into a single decision outcome, some actors might lose more than others. Losers with respect to one decision outcome may be winners with respect to other decision outcomes. The above question directs our attention to the incongruence between demands and outcomes across a range of controversies, which is obviously distinct from who wins and loses on any specific controversy. The answer to this descriptive question is relevant to the legitimacy of the European Union (EU). Whether a political system is legitimate or not is defined by relevant actors’ perceptions; a regime is not legitimate unless it is ‘reasonable from every individual’s point of view’ (D’Agostino 2008). The relevant individuals in this context must include the decision makers in the Commission, European Parliament (EP) and Council. In a representative system such as the EU, these actors are charged with representing a range of interests. Decision makers’ perceptions of legitimacy are conditioned by the extent to which decision outcomes differ from their policy demands. Suppose that decision outcomes across a range of issues failed to reflect a particular member state’s policy demands. Over time, the representatives of the disadvantaged member state would come to believe that the system was biased against their state’s interests.

Political actors may use different logics to evaluate the fairness of decision outcomes in relation to their policy demands (Barry 1989). According to the logic of mutual advantage, actors are concerned that they gain at least as much as other actors, and preferably more. From this perspective, actors consider whether decision outcomes are at least as congruent with their own policy demands as they are with those of other actors. According to the logic of impartiality, actors are not concerned that they gain at least as much as others, but rather that outcomes can be approved of on a footing of equality. Whichever logic is applied, actors’ judgements are conditioned by comparisons of decision outcomes with the diverse policy demands expressed by all actors.