Domesticated Eurocrats: Bureaucratic Discretion in the Legislative Pre-Negotiations of the European Union
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Domesticated Eurocrats: Bureaucratic Discretion in the Legislative Pre-Negotiations of the European Union Gerald Schneider and Konstantin Baltz Department of Politics and Management, University of Konstanz, Box D 86, Konstanz D-78457, Swizerland. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
This article examines the discretionary power of national governments in EU policy making, focusing on the preparatory stage of European legislation. We assess the conditions under which the ministry in charge of the pre-negotiations is able to withstand attempts of domestic stakeholders to change the national bargaining stance. Our case studies and multivariate regressions on 15 legislative proposals show that the overall conflict between domestic stakeholders and pressure from powerful interest groups make such changes more likely. Parliamentary actors and parties do, conversely, not possess much power in these often technical deliberations. Although governments and their bureaucracies have to yield in some situations, they possess ample discretion in the average decision-making process. We illustrate our findings with a comparative case study on the controversial attempt by the Commission to regulate the usage of PVC softeners in toys. Acta Politica (2005) 40, 1–27. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500092 Keywords: agenda setting; European Union; delegation; interest groups; bureaucratic discretion; Council of Ministers
Introduction Conservative observers of the integration process often maintain that bureaucratic and government discretion amounts to a major problem. Vaubel (1994) believes that governments and supranational agents engage into ‘collusive’ behaviour and advance their own interests to the detriment of the electorate. Some EU-sceptics even suspect that bureaucrats push for the establishment of a ‘super-state’ (e.g. Gillingham, 2003). They perceive the occasional regulatory rigour of the European Commission as a sign that ‘Europe has gone too far’, as Alesina and Wacziarg (1999) famously put it. Siedentop (2001) accuse the ‘eurocrats’ of running an increasingly despotic regime. Although most EU-sceptics would like to tame the European ‘mandarins’, few systematic studies on the use and abuse of bureaucratic
Gerald Schneider and Konstantin Baltz Domesticated Eurocrats
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power exist. Frey (1997, 120) complains more generally that the public choice literature ‘is rather mute on the question of how the employees in an international organization use the leeway accorded to them’. This article is an attempt to put the debate on bureaucratic discretion in EU politics on a solid empirical footing. While most extant research analyses the leeway, the European Commission enjoys in its interactions with the Council of Ministers (e.g. Franchino, 2000), our study focuses on the negotiations that a legislative proposal by the European Commission initiates in the member states. These discussions precede the legislative bargaining at the supranational level of decision making. We examine whether domestic st
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