Procedural Politics. Issues, Influence, and Institutional Choice in the European Union
- PDF / 84,291 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 442 x 663 pts Page_size
- 72 Downloads / 181 Views
Book Review Procedural Politics. Issues, Influence, and Institutional Choice in the European Union Joseph Jupille Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, 294pp. Hardback, US$ 80.00 ISBN: 0 521 83253 5 Acta Politica (2006) 41, 440–444. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500132
In this book, Joseph Jupille sets out a theory of procedural politics, defined as the ‘everyday conduct of politics not within, but with respect to, political institutions’ (p. 1). The theory is applied to explain the selection of treaty bases, where these treaty bases imply different procedures for legislation to be passed, in the European Union (EU). In a review of institutional theorizing and research, Jupille finds that most existing research treats institutions as either fully exogenous or fully endogenous. It is also restricted exclusively to higher-order rules on the constitutional level or to lower-order rules on day-to-day decision-making. These shortcomings are the points of departure for Jupille’s theory, in which institutions figure as both independent and dependent variables in a multi-level system of rules. With respect to the EU, the ultimate goal is to paint ‘a more coherent and complete picture of the operation of EU institutions than is currently available’ (p. 7). More precisely, the book aims at answering the questions of ‘why, when, how, and with what effects y actors attempt to influence their institutional environment’ (p. 1). To that end, Jupille presents a theory of institutional selection. Selection refers to the choice of lower-order rules based on a range of alternatives defined by the higher-order rules. The theory claims to improve our understanding of institutional effects and, through explicating feedback effects from lower- to higher-order levels over time, also of institutional change. It sets out with three conceptual premises: First, ‘institutions matter’, because they condition the impact actors have on substantive outcomes. Second, because institutions matter, actors have ‘derived institutional preferences’, not because they value certain institutions as such, but because they reckon with the outcomes these institutions produce. Finally, actors engage in ‘strategic interaction’ within the existing institutional environment to realize these institutional preferences. On the basis of these assumptions, the condition for procedural politics to take place is a simple function of opportunities and incentives. Opportunity presents itself through the availability of institutional alternatives. What makes
Book Review
441
alternatives available is a high degree of jurisdictional ambiguity, defined as the ‘(lack of) correspondence between political issues and the rules used to process them’ (p. 20). The relative desirability of these alternatives, that is, the incentive, is determined by the expected net benefit of playing procedural politics. The potential influence gained must outweigh its costs, mainly incurred through procedural political bargaining. With regard to behaviour and processes, actors will ‘game’ the e
Data Loading...
