CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF DELEGATION IN POST-MAASTRICHT EUROPEAN UNION

Abstract

Who governs the European Union? How are powers and competences to implement EU policies distributed among its components, and what determines that? Throughout this dissertation I aim to address these questions by providing four specific contributions to the academic debate about EU executive governance. First, I extend our knowledge of delegation dynamics in the EU to the whole post-Maastricht period. I analyse competing factors affecting the distribution of executive competences between national administrations and the European Commission. Second, I account for the reliance by the legislator on EU decentralised agencies in secondary legislation for implementation purposes. Third, I analyse and account for the evolution of EU agencies’ mandates and budget from the Maastricht treaty onward. And fourth, I look at the implementation of a specific policy item in the field of food safety regulation in order to investigate how the European Commission and EU agencies use their powers and tasks to shape policy outputs. The underlying goal linking the chapters throughout the thesis is, in sum, to grasp process of delegation to – and the empowerment of – supranational bodies in the EU multi-level administration. The thesis is structured as follows: in Part I, I address the determinants of delegation to executive actors in the EU. After presenting a newly collected dataset of relevant EU legislation in Chapter 2, throughout Chapter 3 I test well-established hypotheses grounded in the delegation literature. I consider policy-specific features – mainly policy complexity– the distribution of preferences of the main decision makers– Council, European Parliament and the Commission– in the legislative process and the decisions rule as explanatory factors for the incentives of decision makers to grant executive leeway to the main supranational institution, the European Commission, and to national administrations. Compared to previous studies, I extend the observation of this phenomenon to the whole post-Maastricht period and show how executive discretion is distributed among salient legislative acts covering the period between 1985 (the Single European Act) and nowadays. My findings, obtained through linear regression models, show that decision rules and conflict along integration lines are the main explanatory factors behind the granting of executive discretion to the European Commission. Moreover, my results suggest that the involvement of the European Parliament through co-decision has resulted into lower discretion granted to the European Commission. Given that the creation and use of specific executive bodies– such as EU agencies and regulatory networks– are actions concerted between the EU legislators and a bureaucratic actor, the Commission, in Chapter 4 I employ both delegation theory and theory of bureaucratic behaviour in order to account for the reliance on EU agencies by the legislator in the same dataset of major secondary laws. By means of logistic regression analyses I demonstrate that the more complex a policy…