Abstract
This slim, professional collection draws together expert analysis from several diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives to examine the European Union’s (EU) co-decision procedure, its expectations and unexpected impact. After all, it was the introduction of co-legislation between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament (EP) in 1993 which promised to herald an era of increased transparent and accountable policy-making, if not alleviate the ‘democratic deficit’. Through its diversity of approaches, the collection delivers a holistic, systematic assessment of how the introduction of co-decision has affected the functioning of the EU’s political system.
The nine individual contributions – problem-driven, theory-driven, data-driven, qualitative and quantitative – and the collection as a whole have already established significant research milestones in examining co-decision and its reallocations of power. The volume succeeds in that it confronts existing orthodoxy and common understandings and develops, as Adrienne Héritier argues, highly interesting and in part counter-intuitive empirical findings on co-decision (p. 137).
Importantly, several of the contributions address the impact of co-decision on the Council which has received far too little attention in the research (p. 13). They also challenge the conventional understanding of the EU as a symmetrical, bicameral system, as written on paper, which gives equal power to the Council and the EP (p. 96). A defining piece of research in this volume by Costello and Thomson challenges that picture. It finds that whereas co-decision has strengthened the EP and weakened the Commission, the Council dominates and holds bargaining advantages over the EP, the latter having simply been unable to achieve material parity with the Council. Furthermore, Häge and Naurin demonstrate that the initial positive effect of co-decision on the politicisation of Council decision-making – through greater ministerial involvement – has been offset by a growing lack of transparency through informal trilogue negotiations to make early agreements (pp. 13, 16).
It is notable that those agreements are often said to reduce the accountability of EU legislative politics or, at least, lead to an efficiency–democracy trade off. Nevertheless, in the contribution by Rasmussen and Reh, informal early agreements, which are often criticised for providing a certain subset of actors’ disproportionate control over the agenda and negotiations, are evidently not found to redistribute intra-institutional influence. Overall, the cautious but reliable approach towards co-decision, examining the balance between an improved procedural efficiency and the difficulties encountered with normative and democratic legitimacy, make it an attractive guide for European public policy and political science scholars.