Joint bodies in the European Union's international agreements: Delegating powers to the European Commission in EU external relations

Markus Gastinger and Andreas Dür

European Union Politics, 2021, vol. 22, issue 4, 611-630

Abstract: In many international agreements, the European Union sets up joint bodies such as ‘association councils’ or ‘joint committees’. These institutions bring together European Union and third-country officials for agreement implementation. To date, we know surprisingly little about how much discretion the European Commission enjoys in them. Drawing on a principal–agent framework, we hypothesise that the complexity of agreements, the voting rule, conflict within the Council, and agency losses can explain Commission discretion in these institutions. Drawing on an original dataset covering nearly 300 such joint bodies set up by the European Union since 1992, we find robust empirical support for all expectations except for the agency loss thesis. Our findings suggest that the European Commission is the primary actor in the implementation of many of the European Union's international agreements, allowing it to influence EU external relations beyond what is currently acknowledged in the literature.

Keywords: Agreement implementation; European Commission discretion; EU external relations; joint bodies; principal–agent model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14651165211027397 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:22:y:2021:i:4:p:611-630

DOI: 10.1177/14651165211027397

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().