EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Who Has Power in the EU? The Commission, Council and Parliament in Legislative Decision‐making*

Robert Thomson and Madeleine Hosli

Journal of Common Market Studies, 2006, vol. 44, issue 2, 391-417

Abstract: What is the relative power of the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament (EP) in the European Union (EU)? Both scholars and practitioners of EU affairs provide different answers to this seemingly straightforward question. In this article, we examine the balance of power among these three actors in the context of legislative decision‐making. We report the results of a small survey among a select group of practitioners of EU affairs. Their judgements on the relative power of the three organizations vary considerably. We distinguish between two contrasting views: a Council‐centric view that attributes more power to the Council of Ministers than to the Commission and Parliament, and a supranational view that attributes large amounts of power to the supranational organizations relative to the Council. To test the veracity of these alternative views, we incorporate them into two variants of a simple and testable bargaining model that makes forecasts of decision outcomes, based on information on actors' preferences. The models are then applied to a dataset that includes information on EU actors' policy positions on 162 controversial issues of which the decision outcomes are known. The variant of the bargaining model incorporating the Council‐centric view provides significantly more accurate forecasts.

Date: 2006
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2006.00628.x

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:bla:jcmkts:v:44:y:2006:i:2:p:391-417

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0021-9886

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Common Market Studies is currently edited by Jim Rollo and Daniel Wincott

More articles in Journal of Common Market Studies from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:jcmkts:v:44:y:2006:i:2:p:391-417