The conciliation committee is the ultimate bicameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? We argue that its institutional setup is biased in favour of the Council of Ministers. Employing the Wordfish...

The aim of this article is twofold. First, I review the political science literature on delegation and control and apply the control side of agency theory to the activities of the Commission. Second, I test McCubbins and Pages (1987) propositions on the determinants of control. I then conclude...

Theory: The adoption of EC secondary legislation can be analyzed from the perspective of agency theory whereby Member States and the Parliament delegate policy authority to the Commission and design ex-post control procedures (i.e. Comitology). Rational choice and sociological institutionalisms...

The literature asserts that legislators are unlikely to adopt inefficient policies unanimously. Yet the systematic and unanimous increase in quantities of Total Allowable Catch, under the auspices of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), is inefficient by internationally recognized standards. This...

The literature on implementation committees predominantly emphasizes their informational role and relies on a sui generis characterization of the European Union. This article reasserts their control function and locates these committees within the core tenets of rational choice and agency...

Three books studying European immigration from the perspectives of economics, political science and sociology reach different conclusions on some key aspects of this policy. I suggest three avenues for future research. First, there is a need to develop institutionally richer political economy...

This article develops a formal model of the politics of delegation in the European Union (EU) incorporating key institutional features: the legislative-executive role of the Commission, the legislative-executive role of the members of the Council of Ministers, the possible implementation of...

This article examines the determinants of the European Commission's executive discretion and the impact of comitology when policy authority is delegated by member states and the Parliament (i.e. principals) and all actors are uninformed about future contingencies. In such context, the Commission...

Slapin (2011) and Finke et al. (2012) represent the best theory-based book-length studies of the most active period of treaty reform in the history of the European Union – from the Treaty of Amsterdam to the Treaty of Lisbon. These works offer the opportunity to assess the extent to...