When viewed from a personnel perspective, the Council of the European Union is the world’s most dynamic legislative chamber, with ministers coming and going much more frequently, on average, than national legislators. Scherpereel and Perez (2015) show that high levels of ministerial turnover weaken the Council vis-à-vis the European Commission and the European Parliament.
This paper focuses on the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) in order to examine how personnel turnover in lower levels of the Council system affects (a) the Council’s power vis-à-vis the Commission and Parliament and (b) the distribution of power among states within the Council.
COREPER is an organizational linchpin of the Council system. Permanent representatives (PRs) and deputy permanent representatives (DPRs) play critical roles in negotiations on legislative dossiers. They draw on network resources and institutional memory to help dossiers progress and to protect the Council’s collective interests. They can also reinforce their respective states’ bargaining power if they know the game of EU politics well and if they successfully leverage their experience.
But just how permanent are the permanent representatives? Analyzing a new dataset that covers a 30-year period (1986-2016), this paper shows that, in fact, there is significant variation in the tenures of PRs and DPRs. It lays out descriptive statistics and compares rates of turnover within COREPER to those at the ministerial level. It presents models to evaluate whether turnover in COREPER affects the Council’s bargaining success versus the EP and the Commission, whether countries with less COREPER turnover achieve better negotiating outcomes, and whether levels of turnover among (deputy) permanent representatives condition the effects of ministerial turnover.
Overall, the paper generates insights into the vertical and horizontal distributions of power within the Council.
