An ineffective legislator? Explaining the capacity of the European Parliament to determine legislative outputs in Justice and Home Affairs under the consultation procedure

How do EU institutions participate in and exercise influence on the law‐making process? On the one hand, inspired by rational choice institutionalism, most studies used spatial models to understand how actors’ preferences are transformed into decision outcomes. On the other hand, constructivist approaches to the EU decision‐making process focused on single or comparative case studies. However, both methodological approaches bear important limitations for the understanding of the actual distribution of power in the EU decision‐making process. This communication examines and explains the capacity of EU institutions to determine policy outputs, while capturing the specificities of a particular EU policy field. It does by applying a new text‐mining approach to all the legal acts proposed under the consultation procedure in Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) from 1998 to 2017. The data has been collected in the framework of the AFSJ‐Pol‐Lex‐Track research project. Preliminary analysis of the data suggests a limited role of the EP in the consultation procedure. Between 1998 and 2017, the European Parliament (EP) rejected 15 percent of the proposals initiated under consultation. The Council completely ignored the opinion of the Parliament and adopted the texts. However, contrary to the conclusions of the literature on JHA, the EP position in consultation is not radically different to that of the Council (Tacea, 2021). Using quantitative analysis, this communication aims to explain these preliminary results. More precisely, it investigates the extent to which different determinants of law-making (e.g., type of acts, policy subfields, voting rules, expertise, salience, polarisation, etc.) explain legislative behaviour.