Gendering Trilogues - a conceptual framework and preliminary findings about inter-institutional negotiations

Trilogues are today a well-established and peculiar feature of the EU. They are the key to successful policy-making in the supranational decision-making regime. Inter-institutional negotiations in the legislative triangle are at the heart of trilogues, which establish a direct relation between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU as legislators plus strong involvement of the European Commission as mediator. Despite the wealth of academic research on trilogues developed over the last 10-15 years, until today they have not been systematically scrutinized with a gender lens (only one article exists, Mushaben 2019). There is today a rich body of gender-related work on the Commission and the Parliament and less so on the Council; however, inter-institutional relations have been neglected in gender research on EU institutions. For gendering trilogues an inter-institutional focus is crucial. In our paper we identify the gender gaps in the existing literature on trilogues. We then introduce a Feminist Institutionalist (FI) approach based on Lowndes (2020) which conceptualizes that gender in political institutions operates through (a) rules about gender, (b) rules with gendered effects, (c) gendered actors working with these rules, and (d) gendered outcomes of action shaped by these rules. Based on FI we discuss what a systematic approach to gendering trilogues could look like. This would entail, first, gendering individual political institutions since the gendered dynamics within the Commission, the Council system, or the European Parliament impact on inter-institutional dynamics. Second, we scrutinize whether inter-institutional rules are gendered and whether gender-neutral rules have indeed gendered effects. This includes how gender and power intertwine. Third, there is an urgent need for gendering the inter-institutional relations in policy-making. This involves differentiating the institutional relations and interaction between policy fields and identifying both support for and obstacles to achieving equality at the intersections of the institutions. We use these three steps to introduce an FI-based heuristic approach to what gendering trilogues could look like. Finally, we illustrate our conceptual ideas by investigating the negotiations on several recent policies of the von der Leyen Commission in relation to the “Union of Equality”. Methodologically, our paper is based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with actors in EU institutions.