Executive Delegation in the European Union post-Maastricht: A Quantitative Analysis

The distribution of executive tasks across the layers of EU multi-level governance is an issue of growing interest among scholars of EU integration. With the progressive extension of the Commission and European Parliament’s competences and the proliferation of new executive bodies e.g EU regulatory agencies and networks, a systematic understanding of how the power of implementing EU policies is allocated, and what determines such allocation, is becoming increasingly blurred. Is the European Union becoming a more decentralised or supranational system of governance? What are the factors influencing the executive discretion delegated by EU policy makers to supranational institutions? The paper seeks to investigate whether variables such as voting rules, the growing involvement of the European Parliament in the legislative process, the use of QMV, the level of political conflict in the Council and divergences among the Council and the Commission have an impact on the amount of discretion granted to the European Commission and other executive bodies, as opposed to national administrations. The paper addresses these issues by replicating and expanding a previous study (Franchino 2007) which tackles executive delegation in the EU from 1958 until the Maastricht Treaty. The empirical investigation draws on an original dataset composed of 300 EU legislative acts covering the whole post-Maastricht era i.e from 1993 to 2016, selected on the basis of their salience through media coverage and analysis of secondary sources. The resulting selection covers most areas of EU policy making, including banking and finance, competition, telecoms, health, food, environment, transports, energy, trade, home affairs, social policy. Qualitative textual analysis is used to identify acts delegating substantive executive tasks to EU bodies and national administrations. The impact of the above outlined variables is then measured quantitatively through statistical analysis. Overall, this study allows to gain a better understanding of how the deep changes that took place in the EU system of governance between Maastricht and Lisbon have impacted the allocation of executive power of the European Union both across time and across policy areas. Specifically, this paper contributes to the literature by essentially expanding the knowledge of most recent patterns of executive delegation in the EU: in particular, it permits to verify – for the first time quantitatively and avoiding selection bias – the causal mechanisms leading to the delegation to EU executive bodies including agencies and regulatory networks.