Significant parts of the EU's legislative process remain shrouded in secrecy. In informal trilogues, representatives of the three main institutions negotiate compromises behind closed doors which are ...subsequently rubber-stamped in public meetings. While most research on (EU) transparency focuses on the availability of documents, this article investigates how much information on trilogue proceedings is shared with the general public through European Parliament (EP) committee meetings as the only forum to which public account must be rendered during the negotiation process. This article analyses the degree to which trilogues are reported back on, and the quality of feedback provided. Although the EP requires its trilogue negotiators to report back to its committees after each trilogue, the majority of trilogues is not reported back on at all, or not in time. Where feedback is given, its quality is often only poor. The EP thus does not deliver on its promises, which seriously undermines the legitimacy of the EU's legislative process.
Informal negotiations have become the norm in the European Union legislative process. Yet, researchers are divided over the effects of this change on the European Commission's ability to defend the ...content of its proposals from modifications by the co-legislators. This article addresses this puzzle by using a fine-grained measure of whether informal negotiations took place which includes trivial agreements, namely legislation adopted in first reading because the co-legislators agree on the content, as a specific category. The results suggest that informal negotiations do not lead to more changes to the Commission's proposals than the formal process. This calls for a better consideration of trivial agreements in studies of the European Union legislative process.
Why do EU actors promote secluded fora of decision making even as they have committed themselves to open and public lawmaking? How do they perceive and reconcile the ensuing tensions in practice? ...These questions, arising amidst growing public controversy, point to a blind spot in the scholarly agenda on EU lawmaking, which has overwhelmingly focused on the games institutions play. From an interpretivist perspective, we argue that rules are 'made' not by detached officials, but by practitioners puzzling out the meaning of their actions in their everyday experiences. Based on extensive interview material, the article captures trilogues as 'politicised diplomacy' and shows how they have become a 'permeable institution', shaped by dense flows of exchange between 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. The article helps pinpoint to what extent and how trilogues challenge democratic norms; and it punctures the myth of trilogues as quiet politics dominated by producer interests.
Despite the importance of supermajority rules in protecting minorities, our understanding of supermajority rules has been limited to the experience of the U.S. Senate. This study seeks to contribute ...to our understanding of institutional choice by introducing another case of supermajority-rule adoption. Once known for legislative brawls, the National Assembly of Korea reformed its procedures in 2012 to require a supermajority to pass controversial legislation. The evidence presented in this study suggests that supermajority rules were adopted in an attempt to reduce chaos and uncertainty in the lawmaking process by shifting the legislature from a norm-based one to a rule-based one. This article demonstrates this by drawing on official documents, interviews, and an automated text analysis of newspapers.
This article traces the origins of European legislation during the legislative policy-making process. It identifies three phases where parts of the text of legislative acts can be developed: (1) ...agenda-setting; (2) intra-institutional decision-making and (3) interinstitutional negotiations, depending on whether the content of the legislation originates respectively in the Commission proposal, the co-legislators' positions or trilogue negotiations. Using a newly developed text-mining technique which computes in which phase each word of a legislative act originally appears, the article examines the relative importance of each phase and explores how it is affected by interinstitutional conflict. Applying this method to 219 legislative acts adopted between 2012 and 2018, it finds that most EU legislation originates in the agenda-setting phase, and that the new content developed during trilogue negotiations is limited. However, the importance of the agenda-setting phase decreases in cases with high levels of interinstitutional conflict.
The Council of State is the consultative constitutional body par excellence in the institutional architecture of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It is a major actor in legislative procedure, along ...with parliament and the government. This procedure is characterised by a shuttle between the Council of State and the Chamber of Deputies and the existence of a three month suspending veto granted to the Council of State. The Council of State can be compared to a reflection chamber and its opinions can therefore have a considerable influence on the preparation and, sometimes, the content of legal standards in Luxembourg. The question regularly arises as to whether the political system of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg does not actually turn out to be bicameral and whether the Council of State is in fact an upper chamber. In order to answer this question, it is necessary to delve into the history of the Council of State, whose roots go back well before its creation in 1856.
In 2009, a network of scholars identified the legal framework associated with coastal management in eleven Latin American countries. They found an important lag in several countries, including ...Colombia. According to many scholars, a clear regulatory framework is of the utmost importance for integrated coastal management; however, the hurdles to reaching this goal have been poorly analyzed. This article aims to illustrate the challenges and barriers to legislate on coastal and marine issues in Colombia. The methodology and analysis used in this study can serve as an example to other Latin American countries. We combined comparative, documentary, and analytical research techniques to describe the current Latin American state-of-the-art legal framework. Additionally, from 16,224 gazettes (official records of the Congress of Colombia) we identified 80 bills concerning coastal and marine activities for a period of 17 years. However, only 2.1% of those bills addressed marine or coastal issues from the perspective of planning and management procedures. Instead the majority focused on social uses and economic activities. This research identified the difficulties that could be faced by a country in regulating its coast from an integrated perspective. These findings could support future procedures to approve coastal laws in Latin America and other countries on the world.
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