W5: decision making in the EU

Question 1

Three types of decisions:

Answer 1

History making decisions: - set the path of EU integration for a longer time.
shape the fundamental structure of the EU, by changing the EU treaties or by specifying fundamental, long-term priorities.
- The basic decisions will be made at the highest political level in each member state, normally head of government with some senior ministers or advisors
- The basic considerations will concern the national interest as perceived by those top politicians
- The basic mode of reaching decisions will be bargaining

Policy-setting decisions: concern the choice between policy alternatives in a specific area.
- What to do, what objectives, what instruments to use
- Policy outlines/direction. Fundamental choices in a policy area

Policy-shaping decisions deal with the details of policies, including the formulation of policy options and the specification of more general policies.
- Detailed instruments and standards, specification of general policy. Decided at the level at administrators

You can rank these from low politics to high politics, the stakes also influence who are involved.

Question 2

High and low politics

Answer 2

High politics: involves the big political stakes, highest political players (European Council). Vital national interests.
- Difficulty: boiling down a lot of different positions to one solution on which unanimity can be reached

Low politics: issues that aren’t controversial, seen as technical.
- main actors: Commission DGs, expert groups, Council working groups, interest groups.

Question 3

What is at stake in negotiations?

Answer 3

The basic idea behind bargaining is simple: if two (or more) actors have different preferred outcomes, they engage in bargaining in order to achieve an outcome that is closest to their most-preferred outcome.
- The zone of acceptability is the set of bargaining outcomes that a participant in a negotiation is willing to accept.
- The zone of agreement or bargaining set is the set of bargaining outcomes that all participants in a negotiation are willing to accept.

Question 4

Bargaining tactics:

Answer 4

• Coalition formation: stronger if you’re not alone
• Persuasion and the management of meaning: giving arguments and framing the debate differently
• Challenging other member states: calling their bluff. A member state may refuse to agree to a proposal, even when it lies within its zone of acceptability.
• Issue linkage and side-payments:
  Issue linkage works if one issue is important to one side and another issue to another side. By linking the issues in such a way that each side wins on the issue it feels most strongly about, a deal can be found for two or more issues together.
  A variant of issue linking is the use of side-payments. When a member state is not willing to agree to a proposal, the opposition can sometimes overcome by offering financial compensation.
• Splitting the difference:
  Splitting the difference between two positions through the middle, so each party obtains something but not everything.

Question 5

Low politics decision making in the EU: an inter-institutional perspective & network perspective

Answer 5

• 80% of the decisions by the Council are pre-cooked. Hammered out in low politics decisions.
• Bit like bargaining, but in many cases it works differently. Main dynamic is one of policy experts pitted against each other on the best approaches
• Dynamic between European Parliament and European Commission, and between Commission and Council of ministers. And one between European Parliament and Council of ministers.

Different kind of politics: institutions that interact with each others

Question 6

Inter-institutional dynamics:

Answer 6

Playing the game within institutional rules:
- Who is allowed to propose decisions and amendments?
- Who can adopt or block decisions?

Veto players: looking at actors who can block something. Institutional and partisan
- Institutional: what institutions can block?
- Partisan: what parties/groups within institutions can block?
- Focus on blocking minorities

The joint-decision trap
- If component states are directly involved in the decision making, it becomes very hard to change things because they will always have a stake in the changes. Especially when the decision making threshold is high, you need a very wide coalition

Question 7

Policy-making is characterized by a large number of veto players, 4 consequences:

Answer 7

1. It makes it difficult to reach decisions.
2. Decision-making in the Council revolves around the creation and dissolution of blocking minorities.
3. Decision-making within institutions needs to take account of the acceptability of the outcomes to other institutions.
4. Actors within the EU operate under a culture of consensus and compromise.

Question 8

Network perspective:

Answer 8

• Advocates (and the reverse) are spread across institutions: within Parliament, Commission and Council of ministers. The real dividing line might therefore not be between institutions, but between coalitions.
• A policy network consists of a set of participants in a given policy field who are connected through regular interactions.
• Different kind of playing field, crosses institutional boundaries. Not how does Parliament interact with Commission, but how does Network A interact with B
• Also beyond traditional institutions: journalists, academics, interest groups.
• More you go to the high politics side: less division, more agreement

Institutions:
- Main players: EU institutions and their component parts
- Political conflict lines between institutions and member states
- Power determined by resources plus formal rules

Networks differ in three respects:
- Main players and types of actors: networks of like-minded actors in different places
- Political conflicts lines between different sets of ideas and interests and the degree of conflict implied
- Power determined by strength of network and penetration in institutions and the stability of the network

All these conceptions have two things in common that are important for understanding policy-making in the EU:
- Decision-making is the result of a wide range of actors that interact, not randomly but in a more or less structured fashion.
- These networks are not confined to specific EU institutions but include actors from various EU institutions plus organizations outside of the EU’s formal institutional framework. As a result, the crucial dividing line in policy-making is often not between institutions but between networks that include actors from various institutions and support different courses of action.

Question 9

Technocracy and politics in the EU

Answer 9

• Technocracy is the view that policies should be exclusively based on knowledge and that policy decisions should be made by scientific experts rather than politicians.
• Technocratic decision-making is quintessentially ‘low politics’. This is true only of part of EU decision-making. Another part is typically high politics and is characterized more by traditional diplomatic bargaining than by technocratic decision-making.
• Why it is often claimed that the EU is largely technocratic in nature?

The claim is often restricted to what we have called policy-making decisions and is not extended to history-making decisions. The argument then is that history-making decisions may be the most visible decisions taken in the EU but they are relatively rare and not necessarily the most important ones for understanding what the EU actually does.

It can be argued that policy-making is relatively less politicized in the EU than in domestic political systems.

• It is important to keep in mind that technocracy is not the opposite of politics but involves a political struggle that is fought with expert-based arguments.

Question 10

Flexibility and inertia in EU decision-making

Answer 10

EU decision-making is very complicated because of a number of characteristics:
- The large number of institutions that are involved in most decision-making processes.
- The relatively high thresholds for taking decisions in the Council (as compared to a simple majority rule).
- The combination of intergovernmental and supranational elements.
- The wide diversity of interests and preferences among the EU member states.

Some have therefore argued that bargaining among member state governments in the Council inevitably leads to an outcome that reflects the ‘lowest common denominator’- that is, a level of ambition set so low that it is acceptable even to the most reluctant member state needed to adopt the proposal.

A more complex argument has been put forward under the name joint-decision trap.
- A joint decision trap arises if the participation of non-central governments in the making of central government decisions leads to policies that are ineffective, inefficient and/or outdated but these policies cannot be changed because at least one non-central government benefits from them.

But: it may not be a general description of EU decision-making:
- Institutional changes since the introduction of the term (QMV)
- Trap might not apply to all types of policy, for example regulatory
- Locus of decision making is not the same for all issues
- Decision making is sometimes sped up through outside events
- Actors can use strategies to circumvent the trap: changing venue