Parliamentary Agency and Regional Integration in Europe and Beyond: The Logic of Regional Parliaments by Bruno Theodoro Luciano

Author:Bruno Theodoro Luciano [Luciano, Bruno Theodoro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Legislative Branch, European, Comparative Politics, Political Science, World, American Government
ISBN: 9781000426960
Google: fQo1EAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57169697
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-08-17T11:57:45+00:00

Rather than competing on institutional issues, this grand coalition of the key political groups has strengthened the EP's demand for more competences. For instance, “a grand coalition was more likely to form on legislative votes where the institutional rules required an oversized majority, and more likely to form on final votes, thereby sending a strong signal to the Council and the Commission” (Hix and Hoyland, 2013: 179). Political groups, therefore, became key agents in the process of the EU's parliamentarisation.

On the other hand, since the implementation of co-decision, the Council of Ministers has also become more politicised and less technocratic. Legislation under the co-decision procedure – where the EP has a de facto veto power – has demanded greater attention from national governments, requiring that decisions should be taken by ministers themselves instead of being delegated to national bureaucrats (Häge, 2011).

Once again, parliamentary agents seized the juncture of treaty reform to strengthen its powers, thereby aiming to make the most of the competences acquired by the Treaty of Maastricht. Through informal and formal instruments, parliamentary agents kept allocating their own resources (political influence and time) with the ultimate goal to increase its weight in European decision-making system. In this sense, the co-decision procedure not only partially satisfied Parliament's demand for a greater role in certain areas but it also became a key instrument to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the Council and the Commission. As Maurer (2003: 244) summarised,

The EP's performance clearly indicates that by building on precedents – conditional vetoes in codecision, linking policy-making with institutional, financial and procedural aims and inter-institutional agreements – Parliament has been able to steer the geometry of institutional relations from a two-sided into a triangular form.

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