Sciences Po - Research Project
4. Formal and Informal cooperation in EU legislative activities
Supervisor: Prof. Renaud Dehousse (Email: renaud.dehousse@sciences-po.fr), Centre for European Studies, Sciences Po (Website: www.cee.sciences-po.fr)
Post-doc: César Garcia Pérez de León (Email: cesar.garciaperezdeleon@sciences-po.org)
PhD: Vlad Gross (Email: vlad.gross@sciences-po.org)
Short project description: Legislative activities play a central role in most EU policies: the EU is primarily a rule-maker, as is widely acknowledged in academic literature, where it is often described as a “regulatory” or as a “normative” power. It is also known that patterns of cooperation vary a lot from one area to the other. Some fields remain subject to unanimous decision-making; others have seen the gradual development of the EU Parliament’s role. While those institutional elements unavoidably influence inter-institutional cooperation, they fail to account for the wide variations that may be noticed. Why is it that voting is more frequent in agricultural policy than in those sectors of social policy where it is allowed? Why do parliamentary amendments enjoy greater success in some areas than in others? To our knowledge, questions of this kind been addressed in discrete case studies, but not on a broad scale. By systematically confronting data on EU decision-making procedures and the observation of informal practices in a variety of policy areas, the project intends to help us to better understand the relative importance of factors that affect EU law-making activities. The quantitative part of the project will be able to take advantage of the data collected on legislative decision-making collected in the framework of Sciences Po’s “Observatory of the European Institutions” and we are especially interested in studies which will test these general data in specific policy fields.