Agenda Control by Interest Groups in Eu Social Policy

Some authors have asserted that the Agreement on Social Policy (the `Social Chapter' of the Maastricht Treaty), by allowing the social partners (trade unions and employers' associations) to bargain over the contents of planned social legislation, grants them the power to set the agenda in the Council of Ministers. A problem is that the precise definition of each actor's competences is unclear from the wording of the Agreement. The first purpose of this paper is, therefore, to examine in a simple spatial model the implications for the legislative outcomes which different readings of the Agreement have. The second step of the argument concerns the distributional consequences of the procedure in each of the interpretations. It is shown that the Commission may benefit from the involvement of the social partners although this limits its own agenda rights. This helps to explain why the Commission chose an interpretation which transfers much of the agenda power to the social partners. It also illustrates the more general point that one should distinguish between agenda rights, on the one hand, and distributional outcomes, on the other.