Coalitional Bargaining and Duration in the EU Legislative Process

The issue of the duration of the decision-making process has been a source of concern for practitioners and scholars of the EU for a long time. Indeed, while legislation is frequently adopted in the EU, the often lengthy negotiations required to pass significant legislation induce gridlock dynamics that put into question the efficiency of the EU legislative process. In this paper, we explore, theoretically and empirically, how coalitional dynamics in legislative negotiations influence the timing in the adoption of legislation in the EU. We start from the evidence that electoral shifts in 27 member states or the EU lead to different government compositions of the EU Council, providing new opportunities for coalition formation. Using a formal model of coalitional bargaining and inter-temporal utility, we argue that when these opportunities allow like-minded governments to form a dominant coalition in the Council, they will they will push other governments to adopt the decision quickly. In contrast, when only heterogeneous and dispersed coalitions are feasible, incentives to save opportunity costs of delay will vanish. Governments then will be willing to see their views extensively deliberated, and to accept amendments of the EP. The result is a slowing down of decisions. We test our claims with data on the winning coalitions for 130 successive compositions of the Council for the left-right and Integration preference conflict dimensions. We combine CMP data with data on duration from the OEI for 1400 legislative acts adopted between 2002 and 2009. The Event History analysis we conduct for this period confirms the expectations of our explicative model. The results are robust and persist after controlling for institutional measures such as the change of decision rule, the legislative procedure, and the number of lectures of the EP.