Who Decides, and How?: Preferences, Uncertainty, and Policy Choice in the European Parliament

by Nils Ringe

Overview

How do individual legislators in the European Parliament (EP) make decisions on the wide variety of policy proposals they routinely confront? Despite a flourishing literature on the European Union's only directly elected institution, we know surprisingly little about the micro-foundations of EP politics. Who Decides, and How? seeks to address this shortcoming by examining how individual legislators make policy choices, how these choices are aggregated, and what role parties and committees play in this process. It argues that members of the EP lack adequate resources to make equally informed decisions across policy areas. Therefore, when faced with policy choices in policy areas outside their realms of expertise, members make decisions on the basis of perceived preference coherence: they adopt the positions of their expert colleagues in the responsible EP committee whose preferences over policy outcomes they believe to most closely match their own. These preferences are difficult to determine, however, which is why legislators rely on a shared party label as stand-in for common preferences. This results in cohesive parties, despite the inability of EP parties to discipline their members.

Who Decides, and How? relies on the respective strengths of quantitative and qualitative data to shed new light on the inner workings of the EP. It illustrates how legislators make broadly representative decisions under conditions of resource scarcity, informational uncertainty, and problematic policy preferences, and how structurally weak EP parties can act in an internally cohesive and externally competitive manner when carrying out their policy commitments to Europe's citizens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199572557
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/13/2009
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nils Ringe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research on the European Parliament and the institutions of the EU has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, European Union Politics, and the European Journal of Political Research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

List of Figures xi

List of Tables xiv

List of Abbreviations xvi

1 Who Decides, and How? Preferences, Uncertainty, and Policy Choice in the European Parliament 1

Outline of the book 9

The EP: members, parties, and committees 13

Conclusion 22

2 Perceived Preference Coherence in Legislative Politics 25

Party cohesion in the EP 26

Parties and shared preferences 29

Problematic preferences and informational uncertainty 31

Minimizing uncertainty: perceived preference coherence in legislative politics 33

Hypotheses 42

Conclusion 44

3 Committees, Parties, and Voting in the European Parliament 49

Part 1 Incomplete information and uncertain policy preferences 52

Part 2 The limits of party control 55

Part 3 Perceived preference coherence and EP derision-making 58

Conclusion 75

Appendix 1 Interview data 80

Appendix 2 Operationalization 81

4 Focal Points as Mechanisms for Policy Choice 89

Invested and indifferent experts and nonexperts: a typology of legislators 91

Focal points as mechanisms for policy choice 94

Conclusion 99

Appendix: The impact of focal points-a spatial representation 99

5 Focal Points and Legislative Derision-Making: Six Case Studies 109

Case 1 The EU takeover directive 113

Case 2 The statute and financing of EU-leve1 political parties 126

Case 3 Proposals on fuel quality and emission standards for motor vehicles 134

Case 4 Liability for environmental damage 145

Case 5 The liberalization of port services in the EU 159

Case 6 EU citizenship and the free movement of people 175

Conclusion 191

Appendix: Coding details for content analyses 196

6 Conclusion: Delegation, Efficiency, and Representation 209

Bibliography 217

Index 227