Data on Delegation

The graphs in this page offer information on the transformation of delegation in the European Union, focusing on a specific aspect: that of the Council of Ministers assigning decision-making powers to the Commission when implementing Community legislation in comitology and the role of the European Parliament (EP) in comitology under the codecision procedure

The graphs are reproduced from an article by Adrienne Héritier and Catherine Moury: Contested Delegation: The Impact of Codecision on Comitology, Forthcoming, in West European Politics, Forthcoming, in West European Politics.

Data and Databases

The data are collected in two different databases:

• The first database tracks the development of Commission proposals based on a given Treaty article (in one policy sector); it uses the EU’s Eur-lex and Pre-lex on-line catalogues, therefore allowing the analysis of the full text of all Commission proposals and parliamentary amendments that have been made since 1994, and enabling us to investigate proposals over a period of fourteen years (up to 2008 inclusively). Eur-lex (formerly Celex) enables to select all Commission proposals in full text based on a given treaty article and to identify the resulting final legislation as adopted by the Council (and the EP in codecision). Pre-lex enables us to track all parliamentary reports (in full text) based on this proposal. Earlier work has convincingly argued that it makes sense to control for the change from the status quo by focusing only on non-amending legislation. We select non-amending proposals, based on a given Treaty article/policy sector to control for policy variation. Furthermore, we focus on binding legal acts of general application (directly or indirectly through member states), i.e. regulations and directives.
• The second database focuses on the EP’s amendments to Commission proposals (across all policy sectors); it is based on the parliamentary online archives (Legislative Observatory - OEIL) that include all parliamentary reports from the same period (1994-2008). The main advantage of OEIL, in comparison to Celex and Pre-lex, is that it allows a search by means of keywords in the full texts of all parliamentary reports. We scrutinized all legislative reports deposited by the EP during the codecision procedure that amended the Commission proposal, the Council Common Position and the joint text of conciliation. Applying a key word search we focussed on all issue areas in order to increase the number of cases. We selected reports which introduced at least one amendment aiming at restricting the scope of implementing powers delegated to the Commission, and codified whether the EP proposed to change the committee(s) proposed by the Commission. We compared the number of reports including restricting amendments with the total number of reports commenting on delegation proposals. Our data collection started with the reports for 1994 when data became available from the EP internet site and extended to March 2008.

Graphs and Figures  

Figure 1: Absolute numbers of delegating and non-delegating legislative proposals, and proportion of delegating legislation proposals (%), N = 102 proposals

 

Figure 2: Number of delegation proposals and number of regulatory committees chosen, N=68 proposal

 

Figure 3: Proportion of adopted delegation proposals preceding and following the signing of the Amsterdam Treaty, N=4

 

Figure 6: Percentage of legislative reports restricting delegation as a % of all legislative reports regarding delegation proposals (N=315 reports)