Authority Expansion of the EU under Conditions of Contested Policy Integration

Some EU legislative proposals are amended substantially as they go through the legislative process, whilst others remain rather unaltered. In this paper, we investigate what defines the decisions of the EP and the Council to introduce changes into the legislative proposals which allow constraining the extent of EU authority expansion proposed by the Commission. We track the shifts in the level of the EU authority expansion from the proposal to the final act and examine the degree to which the conflict of preferences within and across the EU institutions drives the outcome of negotiations towards the SQ. We posit that a politicized environment coupled with the waning support for the EU involvement across policy areas and countries, shape the motivations of both the Council and the EP to adjust the pace of EU authority expansion to the preferences of the relevant publics. However, the EP and the Council members may respond to different groups within the Union’s population and face different time horizons. Discrepancies between country-level support for the EU action and the pro-EU action mood across the member states define the extent of the inter- and intra-institutional conflicts within the Union. To avoid gridlock and legislative failure, the EU legislators are likely to coin an outcome that limits the expansion of the EU authority. To test our argument, we turn to the text analysis techniques and identify the difference in the extent of authority transfer embedded into the text of legislative proposals submitted by the Commission and the adopted legislative acts. We draw on the Eurobarometer indicators to capture the variation in the level of Support for the EU action across policy areas. The findings have implications for EU integration and reform capacity under conditions of policy contestation.