Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Agenda Setting and Legislative Voting in Response to the EU Crisis

Abstract

The European Union’s policy response to the recent global economic crisis transferred significant powers from the national to the European level. When exogenous shocks make status quo policies less attractive, legislators become more tolerant to proposed alternatives, and the policy discretion of legislative agenda setters increases. Given control of the EU agenda-setting process by pro-integration actors, we argue that this dynamic explains changes in voting patterns of the European Parliament during the crisis period. We observe voting coalitions increasingly dividing legislators along the pro-anti integration, rather than the left-right dimension of disagreement, but only in policy areas related to the crisis. In line with more qualitative assessments of the content of passed legislation, the implication is that pro-integration actors were able to shift policy further toward integration than they could have without the crisis.