Compromise or stand my ground? How negotiators experience and handle cross-pressures in trilogues

Most EU legislation is prepared informally in a series of meetings known as trilogues where representatives from the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission meet to reach a compromise before the first formal reading of the proposal. These preliminary agreements are then adopted formally by the plenary and the Council respectively, and defection at this stage is rare, indicating that compromises reached in trilogue usually have the backing of the co-legislators. But how do the representatives navigate the cross-pressures of defending the mandate given to them by their institution, the pressure to reach a workable compromise, and pursuing their own political preferences? Previous studies have primarily looked at the autonomy for these relais actors to pursue their own interests (Brandsma & Hoppe, 2021; Reh, 2014). Drawing on principal-agent theory (Miller: 2005) and sociological institutionalism (March & Olsen: 1989), this study broadens the scope and looks at all three sets of pressures and how they are balanced in practice. This study is based on comprehensive interview material with participants in trilogues at both technical and political level as well as ethnographic observations, and it contributes to our understanding of the EU legislative process in three ways: first, it explores how differences in intra-institutional procedures lead to varied opportunities and constraints for each relais actor. Second, it contrasts the interest-based account of the relais actors pursuing their own preferences with considerations of norms and appropriate behaviour vis-à-vis their home institutions. Third, temporal dynamics are included to probe whether the weighting of different considerations changes over time, both within a single trilogue meeting and over the course of a trilogue process.