Supernationalisation through Implementation? Delegation Dynamics and the Role of Public Support for EU action

Who gets to oversee the implementation of the European policies across the member states and why? How much flexibility do these actors have to adjust political measures to the member states realities? Here I argue that limiting the attempts of the EU Commission to broaden the authority of the EU translates into a more supranationally overseen implementation of the EU policy. Specifically, when the EP and the Council successfully restrict the Commission’s ambitions to expand the powers of the Union in the adopted legislation, they turn to supranational paths of implementation and grant more discretionary leeway to the EU Commission. They do so to maintain the image of policy legitimacy and responsiveness to the public demands for more EU policy involvement, and avoid alienating the public in any specific member state. I test my expectation using a novel dataset of the scaled EU ambitions obtained using text analysis technique. I further draw on the Eurobarometer to estimate the public support for the EU, and the innovative method of automatic detection of the delegating provisions in the legislative texts. The results of the paper resonate with the extant literature on the institutional responsiveness of the EU actors and contribute to a broader discussion on the delegation patterns in the multilevel governance systems.