Explaining the reliance on technical meetings in trilogue negotiations

Legislative negotiations in the EU mainly take place in secluded meetings, known as trilogues, where representatives of the co-legislators (the European Parliament and the Council) negotiate informal compromises which can then be formally adopted by their respective institutions. Trilogues encompass different types of meetings. Political meetings, during which the representatives negotiate, are often prepared by so-called technical meetings, which involve technical staff. While technical meetings are generally recognized as a key feature of trilogues, their use varies across negotiations, depending on the decisions of political meetings. Despite this variation and the importance of technical meetings in trilogues, little is known about how work is divided between the political and technical meetings, and how actors in the former use the results of those in the latter. This paper addresses this gap by examining how negotiators decide to delegate tasks to technical actors, and how they monitor the latter's work in the execution of their task. Theoretically, this article applies a principal-agent perspective, which is specifically designed to understand such a relationship in which a set of actors (the principals, here the representatives in political meetings) delegate to other actors (the agents, here the staff in technical meetings) a task to be performed on their behalf. The analysis uses original empirical data collected through in-depth interviews with actors acting in trilogues supplemented by document analysis. Doing so not only provides a better understanding of the process whereby European legislation is elaborated, but it also has important normative implications. The involvement of non-elected staff in the legislative process has raised issues of democratic legitimacy, which makes it necessary to evaluate the process of delegation from political actors to technical staff to assess the legitimacy of EU legislative decision-making.