Abstract
Why study decision-making in the European Union (EU)? A deceptively simple answer is: because a large share of public policy affecting 370 million European citizens (and many beyond the EU’s borders) is now decided at this level of governance. The accuracy of Jacques Delors’ famous prediction that 80 per cent of all economic and social legislation would be decided at the EU level by the late 1990s remains disputed.1 What is clear is that trying to measure how much legislation is decided at different levels of government in Europe is both pointless and beside the point. What makes the EU novel, interesting and worthy of close study is ‘its unique combination of national and supranational rules and institutions’2 (Begg 1996: 527).
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Notes
Majone (1996b: 265) cites French Conseil d’Etat statistics, from the early 1990s when the EU’s legislative output was at its peak, and concludes that Delors’ prediction does ‘not lack empirical support’. Hooghe and Marks (1997: 25) concur that Delors’ prediction ‘has a solid basis in reality’, while cautioning that ‘such data should be evaluated carefully’. What is entirely unambiguous is that far less than 80 per cent of social legislation was decided at the EU level by the late 1990s.
The strength of Pierson’s account — its ambition to be a general explanation of EU decision-making — is also its major weakness. It criticises LI for focusing overmuch on ‘history-making’ decisions, but then posits theoretical arguments (if not a general theory) which, apparently, apply to any EU decision. For example, the insight that ‘long term effects are often heavily discounted’ (Pierson 1996: 135) seems, logically, to apply to decisions which set policy more than decisions which ‘make history’ (by, for example, changing the EU’s institutions), since the short-term political benefits of the former are likely to outweigh those of the latter.
This distinction is a useful one but it cannot be applied strictly to the EU given conventional usage of the term ‘EU institutions’ to refer to the Commission, Council, EP and so on. See Pollack (1997a: 99).
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© 1999 John Peterson and Elizabeth Bomberg
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Peterson, J., Bomberg, E. (1999). Making Sense of EU Decision-Making. In: Decision-Making in the European Union. The European Union Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27507-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27507-6_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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