Institutional Reform and Decision-Making Efficiency in the European Union

Abstract

tional reform. ince the 1970s, legislative activity of the European Union (EU) has expanded greatly in both scale and scope.' The number of legislative acts adopted by the EU per year increased from less than 300 in the mid-1970s to more than 500 in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the EU gradually extended its competencies to issue areas not explicitly covered by the Treaties of Rome, such as consumer protection, research and development, and the environment. This continuous expansion of EU legislative activity has been accompanied by periodic changes of the EU's institutional framework. The Single European Act (1987) introduced qualified majority voting for a number of policy areas and provided the European Parliament with the ability to influence legislative outcomes. The Treaty on European Union (1993) extended the use of qualified majority voting and strengthened the role of the Parliament in the legislative process. In this article, we analyze whether institutional reform has enabled the EU to deal efficiently with an expanding legislative agenda. A common theme in the literature is that the efficiency of the EU decision-making process has deteriorated considerably as EU legislative activity has increased over the past two decades. A number of studies suggest that the Council is unable to cope with the Commission's legislative output (Scharpf 1988; Sbragia 1993; Dehousse 1995). Other studies point to a dilution in the substantive content of EU legislation (Van den Bos 1994; Heritier 1996; Scharpf 1997). The most common suggestion is that the EU decisionmaking process has become inordinately slow, suffering from an excessive