Do EP rapporteurs matter? Investigating the conditional effects of rapporteur experience on legislative efficiency and effectiveness

Due to the widely acknowledged importance of rapporteurs for the legislative organization of the European Parliament (EP) and legislative negotiations in the European Union (EU), recent years have witnessed a surge in scholarship on report allocation. One strand of this literature has put the analytical focus on who becomes rapporteur, while another literature has examined whether rapporteurs make a difference for legislative outcomes. Our study bridges these literatures by investigating whether the legislative impact of rapporteurs depends on their individual characteristics, most importantly their experience, as well as the characteristics of the proposal at hand. In particular, we analyze how and whether the rapporteur experience and the complexity of the Commission proposal affect the legislative process and its outcome. Our analysis focuses on two dependent variables: legislative duration in intra-institutional negotiations as a measure for the rapporteur’s legislative efficiency and bargaining success in inter-institutional negotiations as a measure for the rapporteur’s legislative effectiveness. Based on a novel dataset, which combines information on rapporteur and proposal characteristics from 1993 until today, we model both the conditional efficiency and effectiveness of the EP’s most central legislative actors with statistical methods. The study contributes to a better understanding of how the EP’s chief negotiators shape legislative outcomes and negotiations both in intra- and inter-institutional decision-making and how their legislative impact is conditioned by their experience. Accordingly, the study not only has implications for the growing research on legislative organization in the EP, but also for the literature on EU legislative politics in general.