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The Journal of Legislative Studies
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More on the co-decision endgame
Geoffrey Garretta; George Tsebelisb
a
Professor in the Department of Political Science, Yale University, b professor in the Department of
Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
To cite this Article Garrett, Geoffrey and Tsebelis, George(1997) 'More on the co-decision endgame', The Journal of
Legislative Studies, 3: 4, 139 — 143
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13572339708420533
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13572339708420533
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More on the Co-Decision Endgame
GEOFFREY GARRETT and GEORGE TSEBELIS
Our recent JLS paper1 pointed out that Roger Scully2 in some places does
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not understand and in others distorts our recent article in International
Organization.1 Scully's latest critique of our work compounds his earlier
behaviour.4 He now uses humour to shrug off his mistakes ('I thank Tsebelis
and Garrett for identifying this inconsistency in their own work' (p.95)) and
belittles points he does not understand, most importantly backwards
induction (which he calls 'simplistic to the point of true banality' (p.98)).
What is worse, he distorts our arguments. Not content to claim that our
published work is inconsistent, he contends that we have revised our
argument (concerning the co-operation procedure) to move closer to his
position. He writes: 'I accept Tsebelis and Garrett's wish to alter predictions
made elsewhere. They must acknowledge, however, that they have
diminished the force of their own argument.' (p.95). Nothing could be
further from the truth.
The outcomes of our models remain consistent throughout. The models
concerning the co-operation procedure were introduced several years ago,5
and the statements included in our International Organization article were
derived from these models under some simplifying assumptions presented
on page 280. One of these is that 'the status quo ... reflects the preferences
of the least integrationist government'. The logic of the argument has
remained unchanged since 1994 (in fact, since 1992 when Tsebelis first
presented his analysis in the APSA meetings). Scully appears not to have
understood our analysis.
In the interest of readers who may be confused after all these arguments
about the Council's agenda-setting powers under co-decision, we focus here
exclusively on the co-decision endgame - that is, what happens in the event
the conciliation committee breaks down.
Figure 1 depicts the interaction between the Council and the Parliament
in the last stage of the co-decision procedure. It looks like Figure 1 of our
Geoffrey Garrett is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University; George
Tsebelis is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los
Angeles.
The Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol.3, No.4, Winter 1997, pp.139-143
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON140 THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
FIGURE 1
A SIMPLIFIED MODEL OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CO-OPERATION AND
CO-DECISION PROCEDURES
3 4 5 6 7
CP X C EP
Notes: CP: common Council position
X: proposal under cooperation
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CP, X: the Council can choose (QMV) any point or one among over a thousand points
(if the Commission has included ten EP amendments in its report) for final
proposal under co-decision.
earlier JLS article (the location of the ideal points of the members of the
Council and the Commission and EP are identical), but there is one
important difference. Instead of speaking about an abstract status quo, we
now depict the common position of the Council (CP), generated earlier in
the procedure. We expect that most of the time CP will be located to the left
of government 3 (the qualified majority voting pivot), because if it were to
the right the EP would not make any amendments in the last round
(knowing that it cannot modify any CP in the interval 3-7), or if it made
amendments (by mistake, or for pure position taking) all these amendments
would be rejected since there would be no QMV to support them. In this
case, co-decision's conciliation committee would fail and the Council
would confirm its previous common position. According to Gary Miller.'up
to the middle of 1995 there was only one case where this sequence of events
occurred under co-decision. In the Liberalisation of Voice Telephony Bill,
the conciliation committee failed, and the Council adopted its previous
common position without accepting any of EP's amendments. The
appropriate analytic conclusion to draw from these data is that in all other
bills considered under co-decision the Council's CP was to the left of 3. Let
us now compare co-operation and co-decision.
Under co-operation, the EP would make a proposal (X) that makes the
pivotal member of the Council (3) indifferent between the Council's
common position and X. Let us assume that the Commission incorporates
ten EP amendments. Tsebelis argues that such a Commission proposal is
equivalent with a set of 1024 (=210) proposals of the form 0101001000,
where 0 stand for amendments rejected and 1 for amendments accepted by
the Council (in the above example, the Council accepted amendments 2, 4
and I).1 Out of all these (over 1,000) proposals, there is one and only oneMORE ON CO-DECISION . 141
that can be adopted by qualified majority by the Council: 1111111111. All
others require a unanimous vote in the Council. This is what Tsebelis called
'conditional agenda setting' powers of the EP.8
Let us now examine what happens in the last stages of co-decision.
According to article 189b(6) of the Maastricht Treaty, if the conciliation
committee does not agree to a joint text, the Council may reintroduce the
position 'to which it agreed before the conciliation procedure was initiated,
possibly with amendments proposed by the EP'. The meaning of the
highlighted text is crucial and controversial. The real issue is whether the
Council must include those EP amendments it accepts exactly the way they
were proposed, or if the Council can modify them in any way. Our
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interpretation is that the Council can incorporate portions of individual
amendments (that is, amend them), as well as using entire amendments as the
EP wrote them.9 The reason is that since the Council is given by the Maastricht
Treaty the power to make the worse proposal (from the point of view of the
EP) of rejecting all amendments and reaffirming its common position, it must
also have been offered the power to make a better offer (for the EP): modify
some amendments in order to incorporate them. Other scholars have claimed
that the Council has to adopt EP amendments as they were proposed.10 So far,
however, there are not data to test these two readings of 189b(6).
What is the difference in results of these two interpretations? In our
view, the Council can select among an infinite set of possible proposals (any
modification of its earlier common position that contains any element of any
of Parliament's amendments). In Figure 1, it could select any point between
CP and X. On the more restrictive view, the set of feasible outcomes is 2 n ,
where n is the number of EP amendments incorporated by the Commission
in its report. Let us play out this more restrictive scenario. Since we have
assumed that the Commission incorporated ten EP amendments, the
Council could select among any of the 1024 (=210) possible combinations of
them in making its final QMV proposal under co-decision. In Figure 1, one
would have to identify 1,024 points between CP and X for the Council to
choose among by QMV.
To recapitulate the above example: under co-operation, the only
proposal that the Council could adopt by QMV was X; under the restrictive
interpretation of co-decision, the Council could select among 1,024 points
located between CP and X; under our interpretation, it could select any
point among CP and X by QMV. If one incorporates the reports in the
literature about the Council's adoption frequently of a least common
denominator position, the outcome under co-decision is going to be either
exactly 3, or a point very close to it." Thus, regardless of the specific
interpretation of article 189b(6), the Council has agenda-setting power
under co-decision.12142 THE JOURNAL OF LEGISLATIVE STUDIES
One implication of our argument is either that the Parliament will make
more restricted amendments under co-decision, or, if it does not and the last
stages of the procedure are reached, that the Council should hold a stronger
bargaining position in the conciliation committee than does the Parliament
(this is an appropriate inference using backwards induction). Is there any
evidence of that? Here is what Miller (of the Conciliations Secretariat of the
European Parliament) reports:
The attitude of the Council often seems to be that its common position
represents the starting point of the whole procedure and the reference
point for any compromise. Since its quality as a legal text is taken to
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be self-evident, given the time and energy the Council has invested in
arriving at a compromise, Council members behave as if they are the
ones who have to be convinced and as if they have no need to persuade
the Parliament that its amendments are not acceptable. Thus, if the
Council has accepted any of the amendments, this is presented as a
great concession on its part. Parliament can in other words 'take it or
leave it', there is no point in discussing the other amendments and if
Parliament is so foolhardy as to persevere with them, it will be up to
Parliament to carry the responsibility for the failure of the procedure
and ultimately to reject the act outright. The members of the Council
thus permit themselves the luxury of leaving the search for a
compromise to others (their Presidency and the Members of the
European Parliament). The compromise must be sufficiently attractive
to persuade them to change their minds."
Our conclusion is simple and consistent with all of our earlier work: the
agenda-setting powers of the Council in the last stage of co-decision
procedure are real. Backwards induction instructs us that rational actors do
not need to arrive at that stage in order to modify their actions accordingly
in previous rounds, and this is why it is such an important analytic issue
(otherwise, big mistakes of interpretation are likely). In fact, the major use
of formal models is to unveil this kind of reasoning of which sophisticated
actors are capable; they improve our understanding of complicated
procedures such as those adopted by the EU for the passage of legislation.
NOTES
1. G. Tsebelis and G. Garrett, 'Agenda Setting, Vetoes and the European Union's Co-decision
Procedure', Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol.3. No.3 (1997).
2. R.M. Scully, 'The European Parliament and the Co-Decision Procedure: A Reassessment',
Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol.3. No.3 (1997).
3. G. Garrett and G. Tsebelis, 'An Institutional Critique of Intergovernmentalism',MORE ON CO-DECISION 143
International Organization, Vol.50 (1997), pp.269-99.
4. R.M. Scully, 'The European Parliament and Co-Decision: A Rejoinder to Tsebelis and
Garrett', Journal of Legislative Studies, Vol.4, No.3 (1997).
5. G. Tsebelis, 'The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda-Setter',
American Political Science Review, Vol.88 (1994), pp.128-42; and G. Garrett, 'From the
Luxembourg Compromise to Codecision', Electoral Studies, Vol.14 (1995), pp.289-308.
6. G. Miller, 'Post-Maastricht Legislative Procedures: Is the Council "Institutionally
Challenged?'", presented at the 4th Biennial International Conference of ECSA, Charleston,
South Carolina, 11-14 May 1995.
7. G. Tsebelis, 'Maastricht and the "Democratic Deficit'", Aussenwirtschaft (forthcoming).
8. Tsebelis, 'The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter'.
9. Garrett and Tsebelis, 'An Institutional Critique of Intergovernmentalism'; G. Tsebelis and G.
Garrett, 'Agenda Setting Power, Power Indices and Decision Making in the European
Union', International Review of Law and Economics (1996).
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10. Miller, 'Post-Maastricht Legislative Procedures'; P. Moser, 'The European Parliament as a
Conditional Agenda Setter: What are the Conditions? A Critique of Tsebelis', American
Political Science Review, Vol.90 (1996), pp.834-8.
11. The use of a unidimensional model seriously simplifies the process, and our only excuse is
that in order to present an accurate picture of the options generated for the Council by seven
amendments we would need a seven-dimensional space, which makes the exercise very
difficult!
12. For more discussion of this issue see Tsebelis, 'Maastricht and the "Democratic Deficit'".
13. Quoted in G. Tsebelis and J. Money, Bicameralism (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp.206-7.You can also read
