Haste makes waste? How public polarization can increase interinstitutional conflict and stall EU informal negotiations

Extant studies of the legislative politics in the European Union (EU) frequently draw on the bargaining theory and explain the duration of negotiations with the level of interinstitutional conflict. Yet, the focus of this literature has lied on such conflict induced by party or government preferences and not public opinion. To fill this gap, we explore how heterogeneous public preferences across the member states shape the levels of intra- and inter-institutional conflict, thus the speed of EU law-making. We argue that the levels of public polarization and salience attached to a policy area across the EU countries shape the duration of legislative negotiations. Under the conditions of increased policy salience and visibility of EU policy action, homogeneous public opinion across the member states enables the EU legislators to conclude negotiations promptly and find the compromises which satisfy the preferences of the public. However, when EU action in a policy area is not uniformly regarded as a desirable outcome across the member states, the EU legislators are constrained in the extent to which they could compromise during policy negotiation without risking political costs at home. This, in turn, protracts the interinstitutional negotiations. To test our argument, we draw on a unique dataset containing information on the duration and intensity of the trilogue negotiations between the EU legislative institutions across policy areas in the period 2009-2019 as well as public opinion data we compiled from the Eurobarometer surveys.