Ellen Mastenbroek
email: e.mastenbroek@fm.ru.nl

Tim Veen

Last Words on Delegation? Examining The Powers of the Union

During the past 10 years or so, the application of theories and models borrowed from comparative politics expanded significantly within the study of the European Union (Pollack, 2005: 368-70). One area of research that has greatly benefited from this trend is the study of the EU's delegation of supranational powers, which has experienced substantial growth in comparatively informed literature over the past decade (e.g. [START_REF] Dogan | Comitology: Little Procedures with Big Implications[END_REF][START_REF] Pollack | Delegation, Agency, and Agenda Setting in the European Community[END_REF][START_REF] Pollack | The Engines of European Integration: Delegation, Agency, and Agenda Setting in the EU[END_REF][START_REF] Tallberg | The Anatomy of Autonomy: An Institutional Account of Variation in Supranational Influence[END_REF][START_REF] Tallberg | Delegation to Supranational Institutions: Why, How, and with What Consequences?[END_REF][START_REF] Tsebelis | The Institutional Foundations of Intergovernmentalism and Supranationalism in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Hug | Endogenous Preferences and Delegation in the European Union[END_REF].

Among the contributions assessing the patterns of delegation in the EU, Fabio Franchino's recently published book The Powers of the Union: Delegation in the EU deserves further scholarly attention. This book can be seen as the first systematic formal analysis of delegation to both national and supranational agents. Concurrently, the theory of delegation developed by Franchino is the first to account for the institutional peculiarities of the European Union. At the same time, Franchino's book is not an easy read. For those who are not well-versed in the specifics of principal-agent modelling or EU legislative-bureaucratic relations, it may be a challenge to understand Franchino's theory. In the following, we set out the book's argument, while critically assessing its theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution. Before doing so, we would like to point out that it is a rather daunting task to review a book that is such a rich source of theoretical innovation, methodological originality and analytical skill. Our assessment is thus intended not as a devaluation of Franchino's achievements but as an agenda for future research on EU delegation.

Key argument

The Powers of the Union is the crowning contribution to Franchino's impressive portfolio of work on delegation. The foundations for this book were laid in 2000 with three articles theorizing the amount of discretion of the European Commission (Franchino, 2000a,b,c). Here, Franchino stressed the balance between the Commission's agenda-setting powers and member states' control mechanisms (comitology). In another article focusing on delegation to the Commission, [START_REF] Franchino | Efficiency or Credibility? Testing the Two Logics of Delegation to the European Commission[END_REF] showed that there is no association between the degree of constraint of the Commission and the two alternative logics of delegation: credibility and efficiency [START_REF] Majone | Two Logics of Delegation: Agency and Fiduciary Relations in EU Governance[END_REF]. Besides delegation to the Commission, Franchino also sought to explain delegation to national administrations. In his 2001 article he analysed the patterns of constraint that domestic agents are subjected to when they are in charge of implementing EU legislation [START_REF] Franchino | Delegation and Constraints in the National Execution of the EC Policies: A Longitudinal and Qualitative Analysis[END_REF]. In 2004, Franchino combined the national and supranational implementation paths, seeking to explain the choice of either of the two [START_REF] Franchino | Delegating Powers in the European Community[END_REF]. In his 2005 article in the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Franchino formalized and modelled these patterns of delegation [START_REF] Franchino | A Formal Model of Delegation in the European Union[END_REF]. These two articles paved the way for The Powers of the Union, in which he empirically researches this unified model, which also includes the role of the European Parliament (EP).

Franchino seeks to find out under which conditions member states delegate implementation powers to bureaucratic agents -the European Commission or national authorities. This question is highly relevant from an academic perspective, given the ongoing debate about the optimal and actual balance of power between the member states and supranational institutions. It is a fascinating question why ministers adopt laws that constrain national governments and administrations, especially from a liberal intergovernmentalist perspective. In addition, this question is normatively relevant because it ties in to public concerns about the powers of the European Commission vis-à-vis the member states. The risks of delegation may be higher in the EU than in national systems, given that the European Commission is less democratically accountable than national bureaucracies.

The added value of Franchino's work primarily lies in the fact that he focuses not on treaty delegation [START_REF] Pollack | Delegation, Agency, and Agenda Setting in the European Community[END_REF][START_REF] Moravcsik | The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht[END_REF] but on executive delegation, i.e. the granting of executive powers to bureaucratic agents on the basis of secondary legislation. He hence seeks to model the 'day-to-day operation of a supranational political system' (Franchino, 2007: 2). In order to do so, Franchino draws upon two literatures. First, he uses existing principal-agent frameworks suited to the American context, notably Epstein andO'Halloran (1994, 1999) on the delegation of powers in the context of the federal system of the United States. This approach is rooted in the transaction costs model of delegation, and has been translated to parliamentary systems by [START_REF] Huber | Deliberate Discretion? The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy[END_REF]. In a nutshell, this perspective assumes an informational asymmetry between legislators and executive authorities. The legislative agent has less information on the consequences of a proposed policy than a bureaucratic agent in charge of implementation. The bureaucratic agents may exploit their information advantage by shifting the policy towards their preferred position. Legislators can prevent such bureaucratic drift by decreasing the agent's discretionary powers. Limiting discretion, however, incurs other costs on the legislator, which 'neither has the time nor expertise to micromanage policy decisions' (Epstein and O'Halloran, 1994: 701). In addition, the less discretion is left to an implementing agency, the less flexibility it has to adapt the rules to changing circumstances. Studies of delegation seek to explain the outcome of this dilemma by modelling the level of discretion set by the legislator.

Franchino adapts this transactional cost model to the EU. He adds to the existing literature on delegation in the EU by including EU-specific institutional variables, such as the decision rules and the choice between the Commission and national administrations as agents. Rather than studying only delegation to the European Commission, he explicitly considers the possibility of delegation to the member states. Moreover, Franchino enters conflict within and between the EU's legislative actors into the equation. Hence, he builds a bridge between legislative-bureaucratic theory and the formal work on EU legislative processes (especially [START_REF] Steunenberg | Decision Making under Different Institutional Arrangements: Legislation by the European Community[END_REF][START_REF] Garrett | From the Luxembourg Compromise to Codecision: Decision Making in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Crombez | Legislative Procedures in the European Community[END_REF].

For the reader who is not familiar with Franchino's earlier work, the exact object of his research is perhaps not as clear as it could be. In the introduction, Franchino states that he seeks to explain centralization and bureaucratization in the EU. Bureaucratization is a rather straightforward concept, which refers to the degree of discretion allowed by a piece of secondary legislation. Centralization, on the other hand, is a bit harder to grasp. Whereas on page 3 Franchino states that this concept refers to the 'extensive reliance for policy implementation on the European Commission', on page 4 he uses another definition, namely 'the relative reliance on national administrations and on the Commission'. Later on, the picture becomes even more complicated, as Franchino explains there are actually five dependent variables, namely delegation to the European Commission, delegation to the national authorities, the degree of discretion for the European Commission, the degree of discretion for the national authorities, and the relative discretion of the national authorities vis-à-vis the European Commission.

Fortunately, transparency enters the equation with the introduction of the formal model (Franchino, 2007: 29). The structure of the model is the following: the players are the Council of Ministers, composed by national governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament, if involved. Besides the standard assumptions common to the literature on delegation, 1 the model is built upon the premise that national authorities share the same preferences as the ministers who negotiate in the Council. The model consists of three main stages. First, at the legislative stage, the Commission proposes a certain policy to the Council of Ministers. Key aspects of the proposal are the baseline policy, which can be visualized as a point on a one-dimensional policy space, a degree of discretion and an implementation path, referring to the choice between the European Commission and the national authorities. Second, the Council sets the policy, on the basis of either unanimity or qualified majority voting (QMV), and possibly with the involvement of the European Parliament. After the policy has been decided, the third stage begins: that of implementation. In this stage the agent implements the policy, based on its cost considerations and staying within the discretionary limits. If agents exceed the limits set on discretion, they may be challenged by the European Court of Justice, which makes such defection an unattractive option.

From his model, Franchino (1997: 53) derives several propositions, which he translates into the following hypotheses (pp. 64-5). To begin with, he argues that delegation to national authorities is more likely under unanimity than under QMV. The inverse holds for delegation to the European Commission, which is more likely under QMV. The explanation is that under QMV a supranational Commission has more chances of gaining the required majority for its position. Furthermore, he expects that the discretion of national administrations increases under unanimity and in areas with great complexity. In addition, in the case of QMV and a supranational Commission, the level of national discretion decreases with increasing conflict. The explanation is that, the more conflict in the Council, the higher the chances of implementation problems, which gives the member states supporting a certain proposal an incentive to shift executive powers from the national level to the European Commission.

The level of discretion for the Commission, to continue, is expected to be higher under QMV than under unanimity if there is less conflict between the Commission and the pivotal Council member, and in issue areas that are less complex. Under these conditions the legislator has fewer incentives or possibilities to curtail the discretion of the Commission. Under QMV, in addition, the level of discretion of the European Commission increases with increasing conflict among the Council members. Diverging preferences in the Council increase the fear of agency loss, a result that a majority of member states want to prevent.

Another set of hypotheses expands the expectations for discretion given above to the discretion for member states relative to the Commission. This relative discretion is thought to decrease with QMV versus unanimity and increasing conflict within the Council, at least when QMV is being used and the Commission has supranational preferences.

Finally, Franchino seeks to explain the preferences of Parliament versus those of the Council regarding discretion. He expects that the EP prefers less discretion for national administrations than the Council, because it has fewer non-statutory control mechanisms to supervise national implementation of EU policies. As conflict with the Council increases, the EP prefers less national discretion than the Council. Moreover, the EP is expected to demand more discretion for the Commission than desired by the Council.

Theoretical contribution

Franchino's main theoretical contribution to the study of the EU is that he tailors Epstein and O'Halloran's transaction cost model (1999) to the complex decision-making process of the European Union. Thus, he does not regard the EU as a sui generis institution, but instead uses existing toolboxes from comparative politics. This strategy is not entirely unproblematic, because delegation in the EU differs in three important aspects from delegation in domestic systems. In our view, these vital differences complicate the application of the existing transaction cost approach.

A first complexity is that the EU has two possible bureaucratic agents: national authorities and the European Commission. As is depicted in Figure 1, Franchino (2007: 29) models the choice faced by the legislative between these two agents. In doing so, however, he forgoes the theoretically prior decision of whether or not to delegate, which is at the heart of the work by Epstein and O'Halloran (1999: 56; see Figure 2). In their model, there is a close logical connection between delegation and discretion, in that delegating no authority comes down to granting no discretion. Their key variable, consequently, is the amount of discretion. Franchino, by contrast, treats delegation and discretion as analytically distinct variables. Decisionmakers first choose an implementation path (delegation), after which they set the amount of discretion. We wonder to what extent we can speak of delegation when the decision-maker assigns no discretion at all. Despite this different focus, Franchino defines delegation in line with Epstein and O'Halloran, namely as 'the granting of substantive policy discretion' (Franchino, 2007: 84). His work hence seems to be slightly inconsistent here: on the one hand he establishes a close relationship between delegation and discretion, while he logically separates the two in both his conceptual model and his empirical analysis. The relationship between the two concepts and the use of delegation as a standalone dependent variable are issues that in our view deserve further attention.

A second complexity is that the EU experiences a less stringent division between principals and agents than most national settings. In Epstein and O'Halloran's account, the legislative is the principal and a bureaucratic agency is in charge of implementation. In the European setting, by contrast, the ministers are in charge of both decision-making and implementation. National ministers are agents and principals at the same time, delegating powers to themselves as well as to their counterparts in other member states. Consequently, there is a tension in Franchino's work. On the one hand, Franchino (2007: 28) views the national authorities as independent agents who are better informed than the EU legislators at the executive stage. At the same time, he assumes that the members of the Council of Ministers and their bureaucracies have the same preferences (Franchino 2007: 26). These two assumptions are mutually inconsistent. We hence agree with Thomson and Torenvlied (2007: 8) that the principal-agent approach might be inappropriate for analysing delegation to the member states. Third, we find that the assumption of shared preferences between governments and bureaucracies cannot be upheld empirically. Different domestic bureaucratic actors, such as departmental units, the cabinet and the responsible minister, may hold diverging preferences as to how a directive should be implemented. This conceptualization clashes with that of Franchino, as this would imply that the positions assumed by the ministers in the Council are not a valid indicator of future implementation performance. It would be interesting to relax this assumption and consider national ministers and their governments as different players, just as [START_REF] Steunenberg | Turning Swift Policymaking into Deadlock and Delay: National Policy Coordination and the Transposition of EU Directives[END_REF] has done for national implementation. This would imply that there might be a difference in the preferences voiced in the Council, the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) and the Council committees (see [START_REF] Häge | Committee Decision-making in the Council of the European Union[END_REF]. A suggestion for future research would be to take this possibility into account, for instance by distinguishing between A-issues and B-issues in Council decision-making.

The fourth interesting theoretical issue arises from the empirical analysis and concerns the link between implementation and delegation. In his empirical chapter, Franchino (2007: 236) finds that problems with national implementation may lead legislators to adopt stricter limits on member states' delegation and to strengthen the executive role of the European Commission. In our view, there is a tension between this result and Franchino's model. As Franchino explains on page 204, the conflict in the Council of Ministers is not always indicative of future implementation patterns. Yet the model does not take into account the possibility that member states do not voice their actual policy preferences and defect during the implementation stage. In reality, member states have an incentive not to resist a Commission proposal openly, being aware that conflict might lead to more discretion for the Commission. In addition, preferences aired during decision-making may be inconsequential when a future government with different preferences is responsible for implementation. All in all, the level of intra-Council conflict may not be a good predictor of the degree of discretion granted, which could explain why the results for the conflict variable are not robust. We could try to overcome this problem by paying more attention to the measurement of preferences and controlling for changes in government.

Finally, we would like to suggest some alternative explanations of the degree of discretion. Franchino (2007: 7) mentions some of them: the need to rely on technical expertise, the wish to reduce workload and to enhance the efficiency of decision-making, as well as the wish to secure credibility. Some of these explanations are highly relevant for the EU. Considering its relatively small administrative staff, the Commission may not constitute a serious option for the delegation of too many legislative acts. In the case of looming saturation, the Commission may find itself stuck between a rock and a hard place and gear its proposals towards delegation to member states. Hence the assumption that the Commission's 'ideal choice is delegation to itself with maximal discretion' (Franchino, 2007: 34) may not always hold. Another important mechanism that may be relevant to delegation in the EU is 'blame shifting'. By putting the responsibility for implementation in the hands of the Commission, member states can introduce domestically unpopular policy while maintaining that 'the Commission made them do it' [START_REF] Smith | The Commission Made Me Do It: The European Commission as a Strategic Asset in Domestic Politics[END_REF]. It would be interesting to test Franchino's model against such alternative explanations. A first step in this direction was recently taken by Thomson and Torenvlied (2007), who contrasted Franchino's predictions with the commitment perspective (also see Franchino, 2007: 187) and the consensus-building perspective, which holds that the granting of discretion depends not so much on transaction cost considerations as on the wish to reach a compromise in the Council (also see [START_REF] Dimitrova | The Search for Convergence of National Policies in the European Union: An Impossible Quest?[END_REF].

Methodology

To test his model, Franchino employed an impressive mixed methods design, encompassing a wide range of analysis techniques. The design consists of three consecutive steps. First, Franchino carried out statistical analyses on the hypotheses relating to delegation to and the degree of discretion for national authorities and the European Commission, as well as their relative discretion. He then proceeded with a qualitative analysis of the hypotheses relating to conflict and decision rules. Third, he investigated the remaining hypotheses concerning the influence of the European Parliament on decisions about delegation and discretion, using ordinary least squares regression and content analysis.

Franchino developed an impressive data set for his quantitative analysis. Counting textbook references, he listed all major EU directives and regulations enacted from 1958 until 1993. This innovative procedure yielded a shortlist of 159 major laws, containing more than 7000 legal provisions. For the qualitative part, he used a different unit of analysis, namely a policy area, comprising different laws adopted over time. The policy areas selected were public procurement, fisheries, telecommunications and non-residents' savings incomes. Finally, for the analysis of the role of the EP, he constructed yet another data set containing the amendments to 414 co-decision proposals.

An important methodological contribution made by Franchino (but see also [START_REF] Franchino | Delegation and Constraints in the National Execution of the EC Policies: A Longitudinal and Qualitative Analysis[END_REF]) is his EU-specific measure of discretion. Building on [START_REF] Epstein | Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making under Separate Powers[END_REF], Franchino constructed a discretion index consisting of two elements. These are a delegation ratio, or the proportion of provisions in a legislative act that delegate executive powers, and a constraint ratio, which refers to the number of constraints divided by the number of possible constraints. Franchino's innovation is not so much in the construction of this index as in the classification of possible constraints on executive action. Franchino describes 12 different statutory constraints that curtail implementation powers, ranging from time limits to comitology.

However advanced, Franchino's method could be improved in the following respects. First, Franchino argues that detailed rules are a proxy for complexity (2007: 145). In our view, however, detailed rules could be an indicator, rather than a cause, of limited discretion. Following Epstein andO'Halloran (1994, 1999), limiting discretion is the way to prevent bureaucratic drift. The legislator can achieve this by developing detailed rules. For this reason, the argument seems to be tautological. The same holds for committees, another proxy for complexity (see Franchino 2007: 146). One could argue that the use of committees is yet another check on executive powers, and thus a cause of increased discretion to national authorities, rather than an indicator of complexity. It would be interesting to use other measures of complexity, such as the number of recitals in a piece of law [START_REF] Kaeding | Determinants of Transposition Delay in the European Union[END_REF].

Having built a data set that covers decades of EU legislative decisionmaking, Franchino faced the problem that there were no data available on Council members' preferences over this period. To solve this problem, Franchino employed the Manifesto data set (see Budge et al., 2001;Laver, 2001), which contains policy positions extracted from party manifestos from 1945 through to 1998. Drawing upon the work of Budge et al. (2001), Franchino convincingly derived three measures of the Council members' preferences. Although this is a laudable and original approach to generate preference data in EU studies, the use of political manifestos has two disadvantages. First, it is questionable whether the manifesto pledges are translated into a government's policy, especially in the case of coalition cabinets. Second, the translation to European politics is not straightforward either. A suggestion for further research would be to use other measures of Council member preferences, based on more advanced content analysis techniques [START_REF] Sullivan | Political Preferences, Revealed Positions and Strategic Votes: Explaining Decision-Making in the EU Council[END_REF].

In order to establish the preferences of Commissioners, Franchino uses a similar method as for the Council: he infers their preferences from their party affiliation or, in the case of non-partisan Commissioners, the preferences of their home government at the time of their appointment. This method rests on a rather contentious assumption, namely that Commissioners share their home government's preferences. This is an interesting assumption because it conflicts with the view that the Commission should act as a pro-integrationist actor. Yet [START_REF] König | Controlling the Guardian? A Principal-Agent Analysis of Commissioners and Member States in the Process of European Legislation from 1984 to 2002[END_REF] showed that the member states are indeed aware of the country-biased preferences of the Commissioners. He argues that member states have established a committee system that scrutinizes the Commission's proposals in order to control for the influence of particular member states in Commission proposals. Recently, Wonka (2007: 185) confirmed that Commissioners are being chosen because of party affiliation. More research on this issue would be welcome.

Finally, we would like to reflect on Franchino's mixed methods design. On the one hand, we applaud Franchino's intention to complement the statistical findings with qualitative results. Qualitative methods can serve as a powerful complement to quantitative analysis, bolstering the statistical evidence found using process-tracing and identifying possibly omitted variables [START_REF] George | Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences[END_REF][START_REF] Lieberman | Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research[END_REF]. However, we find that Franchino is a bit ambiguous on the exact goals of the qualitative analysis. Listing various goals of mixed methods, such as process-tracing, the case studies seem primarily geared towards the purpose of charting and explaining developments in delegation and discretion over time. More specifically, the case studies seem to address a theme that is different from that of the statistical analysis, which is how distributive losses resulting from implementation problems may lead to more executive power for the Commission and less discretion for the member states. The focus thus shifts from an explanation of how executive powers are designed to how they are amended over time.

Whereas Franchino offers an interesting account of how delegation patterns change over time in the four policy areas studied, he does not live up entirely to his promise to unveil the causal mechanisms underlying the statistical results. Instead of process-tracing, he often merely interprets the patterns found, using his model. For instance, in the case of telecommunications, Franchino (2007: 226) finds that there is no clear trend towards more or less discretion over time. He argues that this must be related to low to moderate conflict in the Council. When he finds that much literature finds the opposite, he argues that this divergence 'is probably overplayed' (ibid: 227), citing two authors who support this view. In our view, Franchino could have linked the case studies more closely to the quantitative analysis, through process-tracing as recommended by [START_REF] George | Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences[END_REF], and the identification of omitted variables, through a careful comparison of cases that were well predicted by the model and cases that were 'off the line' [START_REF] Lieberman | Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research[END_REF].

In addition, the overall research design is a bit imbalanced. Whereas Franchino carefully justifies his quantitative design, he pays relatively little attention to his qualitative design. For instance, the basis of case selection is not entirely clear. Franchino (2007: 200) states that the selected cases are 'archetypal examples of the situations EU legislators encounter when they decide to delegate executive powers'. Using the variables decision rule, the severity of intra-Council conflict and Commission preferences, he selected four cases, without making clear why these are archetypal. Equally confusing is the fact that, in this stage, the units of analysis are policy areas rather than individual legislative acts. Franchino (2007: 200) argues that this is important so as to keep 'legal, political and public policy attributes' constant. Yet he does not clearly list these attributes, nor does he discuss the possibility that these attributes change over time. In sum, we feel that Franchino could have bolstered his findings by better justifying his design.

Empirical contribution

Franchino's key empirical achievement is that he investigates the effects of both conflict and decision rules on delegation decisions. Franchino shows that delegation to the Commission is more likely under QMV than under unanimity. By contrast, delegation to the member states is more likely under unanimity. Also, unanimity leads to greater national discretion than does QMV, and to less discretion for the Commission. Under QMV, more policy-related conflict leads to greater discretion for the Commission, in both relative and absolute terms. Results for the other measures of intra-Council conflict, referring to the integration and left-right dimensions, are less straightforward. Regarding policy complexity, Franchino finds that member states are given more discretion in highly complex policy areas, and the discretion of the Commission generally increases when implementation requires general and managerial skills. Findings for the effect of conflict between the Council and the Commission are not robust. An increasing distance between the Commission's policy position and that of the Council pivot does not have a clear effect on the discretion given to the European Commission. These results are broadly supported by the case studies. Finally, concerning the role of the EP, Franchino's main conclusion is that delegation to and discretion of the Commission increase when the EP plays a role, especially when there is conflict between the EP and the Council.

Furthermore, Franchino also pays explicit attention to his descriptive findings. Most importantly, he finds that EU legislators rely twice as often on national administrations as on the European Commission for implementation. Moreover, for about 13% of all cases Franchino found no delegation to the national administrations, and the Commission was excluded from the implementation of every second law (55%). In nearly 60% of the cases the legislative chose a singular implementation path. Regarding the policy fields, delegation to national authorities is most common in legislation concerning the movement of persons, taxation and company law. Low national delegation rates are found in measures relating to competition law, customs law and agriculture. Yet in our view we should treat these figures with caution, given that the delegation ratio by itself is a rather ambiguous measure if it has not been corrected for the number of constraints. A legislator may grant extensive powers to an agent while counteracting this with extensive constraints, which results in zero discretionary powers. It is not entirely clear to what extent the delegation ratio is a useful standalone indicator. At the same time, this part of the discretion measure has been implemented as such in recent research, even serving as a measure of discretion (Thomson et al., 2007: 694).

Concerning discretion, the European Commission is confronted with twice as many statutory constraints as are national authorities. In line with our previous remarks, it is interesting to note that, the more executive powers are delegated, the more constraints are imposed on the agents, thus lowering discretion. Discretion, which Epstein and O'Halloran (1999: 90) defined as a dichotomous variable from 0 (no delegation) to 1 (full delegation), ranges from 0 to 0.49 for national administrations, with the mean at 0.16. Commission discretion ranges from 0 to 0.34, with the mean at 0.04. Furthermore, Franchino finds that the average number of provisions has declined steadily over time, identifying a tendency in the EU towards laws with fewer provisions. An opposite trend is reported for the amount of discretion, at least for the national administrations. The data show that national discretion has increased by about 1% a year. For the Commission, no such long-term trend is identified. Here, an increase in discretion appears to be linked to the eras of the Commission's presidents: under Hallstein and Delors, the Commission acquired relatively many delegated powers.

Franchino's results indicate that the Commission faces serious constraints when it comes to the implementation of EU policies. Therefore, one could argue that the Commission is not a 'runaway bureaucracy', escaping effective steering and control by member states, but rather a controlled agency whose powers are being carefully limited. At the same time, Franchino has shown that the degree of control over the Commission depends on the Commission's president. If a strong leader is in charge, controls can loosen, resulting in more discretion. What is more, as we have argued, it is not clear to what extent the delegation ratio in itself is a valid indicator of the degree of centralization. The discretion ratio, a more valid measure, on average is higher for the member states than for the Commission. All in all, fears of extensive centralization seem to be misplaced; the legislators keep a very tight check on the Commission.

These empirical results, though, have to be interpreted with caution. First, the data set is relatively small (n = 153), especially as it comprises more than three decades of legislation, which comes down to an average of about five laws a year. When compared with the annual output of secondary legislation, estimated at more than 500 in the mid-1980s (Schulz and König, 2000: 653), this bias becomes even more apparent. Second, the data are biased towards conflict, because they cover only the major laws of the EU (Franchino, 2007: 80). This bias reduces the external validity of the findings and challenges Franchino's intention to understand day-to-day decision-making in the EU. It would be interesting to find out more about delegation patterns in more 'technical' EU legislation.

Conclusion

Franchino has written a rigorous account of the mechanisms underlying delegation in the EU. Combining insights from the general transaction costs literature with spatial models of EU decision-making, he sets the standard for further work on EU delegation.

The empirical implications of Franchino's work are clear and convincing. Most importantly, he demonstrates that, the greater the conflict within the Council, the more discretion is given to the European Commission under QMV. By contrast, the greater the conflict within the Council, the more restricted are the implementation powers of national bureaucracies. This latter finding sets the EU apart from national political systems, where conflict has been proven to increase the level of discretion for executive agents. In this respect, the EU appears to be a sui generis phenomenon after all.

Franchino's work offers a solid basis for further theoretical and empirical work. We envisage the following research agenda. A first avenue for future research would be to relax the assumption that ministers and their governments hold the same preferences. Second, more work could be done on measuring Council preferences, for instance using more advanced content analysis techniques or expert judgements. Third, more research could be done that tests Franchino's principal-agent model against competing explanations of delegation such as commitment, blame-shifting and consensus-seeking. Fourth, we could pay more attention to the variable of complexity, and develop alternative measures. Fifth, it would be interesting to carry out more case studies that lay bare the causal mechanisms linking conflict to delegation outcomes and identify possibly omitted variables. Such research would greatly increase the plausibility of Franchino's results. Finally, with regard to Franchino's objective of understanding day-to-day decisionmaking, it would be interesting to repeat his analysis on a data set not only containing major EU laws but extending to the more technical measures that the EU enacts on a daily basis.

A final set of questions that require more attention concerns the normative implications of EU delegation. Franchino rightly argues that delegation studies are important from a normative point; the general 'uneasiness' about centralization processes is even more relevant for the EU than for national states, given the alleged democratic deficit of the EU. We agree with Franchino that such questions cannot be answered on the basis of empirical research. The judgement of whether the EU is too centralized should be a political one. But the rich empirical information provided by Franchino offers a first step towards answering this question: member states are more at ease delegating powers to national bureaucracies than to the supranational European Commission, unless they have reason to distrust the intentions of their colleagues in the Council.

Notes 1

More technical assumptions are that the policy space is one-dimensional and that preference points are single-peaked. The players' utility is assumed to have a quadratic functional form. Legislators act under uncertainty; implementing agents have an information advantage over legislators.

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1 Franchino's model of delegation (simplified).Source:Franchino, 2007: 29.

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 Epstein and O'Halloran's model of delegation (simplified).Source:Epstein and O'Halloran, 1999: 56.

European Union Politics 9(2)


Andreas Warntjen
email: a.k.warntjen@utwente.nl

The Council Presidency Power Broker or Burden? An Empirical Analysis

The potential impact of the EU Council Presidency on legislative decision-making has been frequently identified. This article provides an empirical analysis of the Presidency's influence on decision outcomes based on a large-n data set. Two counterfactuals are used to represent consensual decision-making and hard bargaining in the Council. The role of supranational actors is controlled for directly. The findings show that a member state benefits from holding the Presidency during the final stages of the legislative proceedings. Besides the support of supranational actors, the regression analysis controls for the voting threshold, the type of proposal and salience.

Introduction

It is commonly held that the Council Presidency plays a special role in legislative negotiations in the European Union (EU). Consequently, whether or not the system of rotation for the Presidency should be kept was one of the most contentious topics during recent discussions on treaty reform. In this article, I investigate whether or not the Presidency has a disproportionate influence on decision outcomes. A member state might benefit from holding the office of the Presidency owing to its prerogatives of making proposals and/or informational asymmetry. However, the powers of the Presidency are limited. Some authors even argue that the Presidency's spot in the limelight puts pressure on the member state at the helm to make extraordinary concessions. Which one of these contending theoretical perspectives is correct can be decided only upon analysing empirical evidence. This article presents evidence with regard to the Presidency's influence on legislative outcomes based on a large-n study of legislative decision-making. In line with the theoretical literature on the concept of power, a counterfactual outcome based on general bargaining models is established to investigate whether or not a member state exercised disproportionate influence. A member state is deemed influential if the actual outcome frequently deviates from the counterfactual in the direction of the actor's ideal position. It would suggest that the office of the Presidency adds to the power of a member state if this happens more frequently when a member state is holding the Presidency.

Previous quantitative studies based on the 'Decision-making in the European Union' data set have found a Presidency effect for the final stage of negotiations [START_REF] Schalk | The Power of the Presidency in EU Council Decision-making[END_REF][START_REF] Thomson | The Council Presidency in the European Union: Responsibility with Power[END_REF]. However, these analyses are based on a direct comparison of policy distances across different issues and proposals. As I argue below, owing to the measurement technique, comparisons across issues can lead to misleading results. To avoid these problems, the analysis presented in this article proceeds at the issue level. Furthermore, previous studies have assumed consensual bargaining in the Council when choosing the counterfactual. However, it is still unclear how best to characterize decision-making in the Council. Thus, this analysis utilizes two bargaining models, representing both consensual decisionmaking and hard bargaining. Although the results confirm earlier findings with regard to the impact of the Presidency, evidence is also found for the impact of the supranational actors. This result is in line with the general empirical literature on legislative decision-making.

The paper proceeds as follows. After discussing the theoretical bases of the different claims with regard to the effect of the Presidency, I explain my research design. I include a discussion of the measurement of power in spatial models and the two baseline models that are used. I then describe the data and explain why a comparison of policy distances across issues could lead to misleading results. Lastly, I present the empirical analysis and the results.

The Council Presidency: Power broker, neutral chair or burden?

There is broad consensus in the literature that the Council Presidency provides the member state that is holding it with an opportunity to influence legislative decision-making [START_REF] Kirchner | Decision-making in the European Community -The Council Presidency and European Integration[END_REF][START_REF] Schout | The Presidency as Juggler. Managing Conflicting Expectations[END_REF][START_REF] Dinan | Ever Closer Union -An Introduction to European Integration[END_REF][START_REF] Hix | The Political System of the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Peterson | Decision-making in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Westlake | The Council of the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Sherrington | The Council of Ministers. Political Authority in the European Union[END_REF]. Consequently, the issue of the rotating Presidency was one of the most contentious topics in the discussions on institutional reform at the constitutional convention [START_REF] König | The Laeken Convention. Consensus without Unity[END_REF]. However, it has been pointed out that the Presidency's powers are limited. Some scholars have even argued that a member state has to make extraordinary concessions during its term at the helm.

The Presidency gives an informational and procedural advantage to a member state during its six months in office [START_REF] Tallberg | The Agenda-Shaping Powers of the EU Council Presidency[END_REF][START_REF] Tallberg | Leadership and Negotiation in the European Union[END_REF]. Because of its central role, the Presidency can acquire private information about the concessions member states would be willing to make (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace, 2006: 144, 150;Tallberg, 2006: 114-15). According to some scholars, the co-decision procedure has further empowered the Presidency, which acts as a representative of the Council in the informal 'trialogues' between the Council and supranational actors (Peterson and Bomberg, 1999: 35;[START_REF] Farrell | Interorganizational Negotiation and Intraorganizational Power in Shared Decision Making. Early Agreements under Codecision and Their Impact on the European Parliament and Council[END_REF]Heritier, 2004: 1203;Tallberg, 2006: 145). The Presidency can, for example, misrepresent the position of the European Parliament in the final stages of the legislative proceedings to further its own interests (Tallberg, 2006: 145). In procedural terms the Presidency has the prerogative of making proposals (Tallberg, 2006: 116-17;[START_REF] Warntjen | Steering but Not Dominating: The Impact of the Council Presidency on EU Legislation[END_REF]. Proposal power gives a first-mover advantage to the Presidency; thus the member state holding the Presidency can reap disproportionate benefits.

The Presidency, however, does not reign freely during its term in office (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace, 2006: 148). The supermajoritarian voting threshold and the need to reach a unanimous consensus in the Council in some cases diminish the impact of proposal power. In addition, depending on the legislative procedure, the position of the Commission and the European Parliament might also have to be taken into account (Tallberg, 2006: 117-19). Furthermore, the information advantage of the Presidency might diminish as negotiations go on and all member states learn about their respective positions. Similarly, a member state might be able to sound out colleagues on an issue that is of high importance to it. The same can be true with regard to the position of the European Parliament (see Garman and Hilditch, 1998: 279). Furthermore, the Commission is represented at the 'trialogues' and regularly attends Council meeting (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace, 2006: 34), putting it into a good position to spoil the tactical manoeuvrings of the Presidency. In addition, member states hold the office of the Presidency for only six months. Member states might prefer to wait for the next country to take over, which might have preferences closer to their own, rather than make concessions to the current Presidency. Finally, the Presidency can act only on an inherited agenda.

Because of these constraints, the overall effect of the Presidency on decision outcomes might be negligible. Furthermore, chairing the office of the Presidency puts a member state into the limelight, which might induce it to make extraordinary concessions. If the member state holding the Presidency values a reputation for being neutral, then its ability to defend its own national interests would be impaired (Wallace, 1985: 15-17;Kirchner, 1992: 107-9;Christiansen, 2006: 157;[START_REF] Elgström | The Honest Broker"? The Council Presidency as a Mediator[END_REF]Nugent, 2003: 163). In addition, member states might be induced to make national sacrifices in order to be perceived as a productive and efficient Presidency (Dinan, 1999: 245-6). As Peterson and Bomberg (1999: 35) put it: 'each presidency is judged by how "productive" it is, thus often inducing the state holding the chair to compromise its own national preferences to get deals agreed.' Thus, instead of being powerful or seeing its powers limited in practice, the Presidency might even feel pressure to make extraordinary concessions.

In sum, although the potential impact of the Presidency is widely acknowledged, there is no agreement on whether or not the Presidency successfully influences EU legislation. The literature highlights the voting threshold, the legislative procedure and the support of the European Commission and European Parliament as factors affecting the power of the Presidency. The voting threshold affects the range of actors that have to be taken into account to adopt legislation. The role of the Council Presidency also differs across legislative proceedings. Hence, both factors have to be controlled for in the empirical analysis. Furthermore, an actor might not benefit from being in office but might benefit from the support of the supranational actors. The influence of the supranational actors in legislative decision-making is subject to considerable theoretical debate [START_REF] Hörl | Built on Quicksand? A Decade of Procedural Spatial Models on EU Legislative Decision-Making[END_REF][START_REF] Steunenberg | Testing Procedural Models of EU Legislative Decision-making[END_REF]. Previous empirical studies have pointed to the impact of both the Parliament and the European Commission on legislative decisions [START_REF] Tsebelis | Legislative Procedures in the European Union: An Empirical Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Selck | Between Power and Luck. The European Parliament in the EU Legislative Process[END_REF][START_REF] König | Bicameral Conflict Resolution in the European Union: An Empirical Analysis of Conciliation Committee Bargains[END_REF]. Thus, the support of the supranational actors should also be included in the empirical analysis.

The most comprehensive empirical studies on the impact of the Presidency on decision outcomes so far are based on data gathered by the 'Decision-making in the European Union' (DEU) project [START_REF] Thomson | Research Design: Measuring Actors' Positions, Saliences and Capabilities[END_REF]. The data set contains information on the preferences of all Council members, the European Commission and the European Parliament, as well as decision outcomes for 66 Commission proposals pending in 1999-2001. The positions are represented on a standardized issue continuum ranging from 0 to 100. [START_REF] Thomson | The Council Presidency in the European Union: Responsibility with Power[END_REF] analyses whether or not decision outcomes are closer to member states that held the Council Presidency during the legislative process. His regression analysis includes control variables for the extremity of the member state's position and the average extremity of all actors. Extremity of an actor is defined as the average distance between the position of an actor from the positions of all other actors weighted by their voting power and the importance they attach to a given issue. In addition, the voting power (Shapley-Shubik) of an actor, the legislative procedure and the applicable voting threshold in the Council were controlled for. The findings show that decision outcomes are closer to the member state that held the Presidency at the time a proposal was adopted (p < = .1). The effect of holding the Presidency during the negotiations depends in some instances on the member state's relative position and the voting threshold.

Schalk and colleagues estimate whether or not holding the Presidency leads to outcomes closer to a member state's ideal point, using a weighted mean as a baseline model [START_REF] Schalk | The Power of the Presidency in EU Council Decision-making[END_REF]. The weights used are voting power (Shapley-Shubik) and salience. They also find that holding the Presidency benefits a member state only during the adoption stage of a proposal. The Presidency's power is not affected by salience, voting power or the proximity of the Presidency's ideal point to the Commission's position.

The analysis presented here is also based on the DEU data set but differs in three substantial ways from previous studies. First, my analysis proceeds on the issue level and hence does not involve a comparison of policy distances across issues. Owing to the measurement technique, which attributes the same value for the maximum distance to all issues regardless of its content, distances between two positions and changes therein (such as a shift of policy towards the ideal position of an actor) cannot be compared directly across issues (see below). Not taking this into account can lead to misleading results. Second, I use a complementary research strategy to account for the different characterizations of Council negotiations as consensual decision-making or hard bargaining. Third, I develop a measure to control directly for the support of both supranational actors -the European Parliament and the European Commission -to distinguish further between power and luck. The role of the supranational actors in legislative decision-making is subject to an ongoing debate; thus we need to control for their influence separately from the impact of other Council members.

Research design: The measurement of power

Power is often attributed to an actor who benefits from a given outcome: cui bono? More specifically, power is commonly understood as the capacity to influence events towards desirable outcomes [START_REF] Harsanyi | Measurement of Social Power, Opportunity Costs, and the Theory of Two-Person Bargaining Games[END_REF][START_REF] Dahl | Power[END_REF][START_REF] Morriss | Power: A Philosophical Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Dowding | Power[END_REF]. The measurement of power involves two difficulties. To start with, it is an inherently counterfactual concept. In order to measure it we need to establish what the outcome would have been without an actor exercising power. Additionally, we need to distinguish between power and luck. An outcome might be beneficial to several actors, obscuring who was decisive in bringing it about.

Power has been famously defined as 'the chance that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this chance rests' [START_REF] Weber | Wirtschaft und Gemeinschaft[END_REF] 28, my translation). Weber's definition refers to the possibility of resistance, which would be overcome by a powerful actor. This is crucial; a powerful actor has to be decisive in bringing about the outcome. Thus, power 'gives its possessor the opportunity to change outcomes from what they would otherwise have been, in the direction that the possessor wishes' (Barry, 1991: 272). This highlights the counterfactual nature of power. If there is a change that is beneficial to the actor and if that change would not have occurred without the involvement of this actor, we think of that actor as influential and hence powerful.

To establish the counterfactual outcome I rely on two general bargaining models, the pivot model and the compromise model. An actor can be considered to be influential if an outcome regularly deviates from the model prediction towards the ideal position of the actor and this is not owing to the influence of another actor (luck). The counterfactual models include the positions of other member states but do not account for differences between member states due to Presidency. If member states exercise a disproportionate amount of influence while holding the Presidency, this would suggest that the office of the Presidency is powerful. To account for the potential impact of the supranational actors, their support of a member state's position will be controlled for directly.

I use two different models to establish the counterfactual outcome in the Council because decision-making in the Council can be characterized as either a consensual process or hard bargaining [START_REF] Mattila | Why Unanimity in the Council? A Roll Call Analysis of Council Voting[END_REF][START_REF] Lewis | Institutional Environments and Everyday EU Decisionmaking. Rationalist or Constructivist?[END_REF]Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace, 2006: Ch. 11). The first type of model is represented by the compromise model [START_REF] Van Den Bos | Dutch EC Policy Making[END_REF]. It is based on the assumption that a group collectively optimizes its utility from a decision. Furthermore, it assumes that reaching any agreement is strongly preferred to the status quo by all actors. Thus, divisions between member state governments on the exact outcomes are secondary to agreement on the necessity to adopt any EU legislation. The argument is that all member states value the existence of the Union per se and are thus willing to make sacrifices on individual policies (Achen, 2006: 101-4). However, the member state governments represented in the Council are arguably more interested in being re-elected in the domestic arena. Hence they have rather short time horizons and might view the European Union as a mere instrument for changing policies. In addition, after decades of EC/EU legislation, policies that are universally accepted as superior have already been adopted. Thus, division over how to amend existing EU legislation will be dominant in decision-making rather than consensus on the desirability of EU law. Furthermore, decision-making in the Council arguably takes place issue by issue (König, 2005: 368;Thomson and Stokman, 2006: 51). The fragmentation of decision-making in the Council and changes in the Council's composition owing to national elections impair vote-trading or other mechanisms that would secure collective agreements (Moravcsik, 1993: 505;[START_REF] Golub | Institutional Reform and Decision-Making in the European Union[END_REF]. Hence, actors would insist on their positions and maximize any bargaining advantage they might have. This can be captured by the pivot model described below.

Proponents of the consensual view point to the frequent occurrence of unanimous votes in the Council even when qualified majority voting is applicable (e.g. Achen, 2006: 102). However, the recorded votes represent only a fraction of the decisions taken in the Council, and the mechanism underlying voting behaviour in the Council remains unclear (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace, 2006: Ch. 10). Similarly, the high proportion of legislation that gets accepted in the EU might be the result of the lack of time limits at the firstreading stage, which means that proposals can be taken up again after governments have changed, rather than of a culture of consensus. Furthermore, the Commission might tailor its initial proposal to the preferences of the member states to ensure adoption [START_REF] König | From an Ever-Growing towards an Ever-Slowing Union?[END_REF]. Thus, whether legislative decision-making in the Council is a consensual process or hard bargaining is still an open question. To account for this, the analysis utilizes two bargaining models to establish the counterfactual outcome: the compromise model represents consensual decision-making, the pivot model hard bargaining.

The pivot model postulates that the outcome of decision-making will be either the ideal position of the pivotal voter positioned closest to the status quo or no change in policy. Consider a committee that has to make a decision on a one-dimensional policy space, as in Figure 1. For ease of exposition, assume that all members have one vote. If no actor is privileged by the rules (e.g. no one has agenda-setting power) and the decision is made by simple majority, then the outcome would be the ideal point of the median voter (i.e. P 4 ). Under the simple majority rule, the median voter is the pivot, the actor whose support is crucial in passing a decision [START_REF] Krehbiel | Pivots[END_REF]. Now consider the situation in Figure 1 if the approval of 5 out of 7 members is needed to enact new legislation. To shift policy to the right, the approval of the fifth committee member from the right (i.e. P 3 ) is pivotal. Indeed, this will be the outcome given the location of the status quo (SQ). Any rightward move from the status quo that is supported by the pivot (P 3 ) would also get the support of the actors to its right (P 4 to P 7 ). Together they form a sufficient majority. The pivot can successfully insist on his/her ideal position because he/she benefits from a status quo bias (Hopmann, 1998: Ch. 4;[START_REF] Napel | The Inter-Institutional Distribution of Power in EU Codecision[END_REF]: Proposition 1). To illustrate the logic behind this, consider the ideal point of P 4 as an alternative outcome. A sufficient majority (P 3 to P 7 ) would prefer P 4 to the status quo. However, because the appreciation of the status quo varies among the members of this coalition, they have a different impact on the decision outcome. P 3 is 'less eager' (Napel and Widgren, 2006: 136) than P 4 to P 7 on replacing the status quo and can hence successfully insist on his/her ideal position. The same logic applies to shifts to the left. Thus, the pivot model represents a situation of hard bargaining where actors utilize all advantages they have and insist on their ideal position, rather than opting for a compromise.

Whether or not a change in policy (i.e. a shift to the left or right) is viable depends on the location of the status quo. This is illustrated by Figure 2. We can distinguish three scenarios. If the SQ is located to the left of the pivot for rightwards shifts P r (I), the outcome will be the position of P r . Conversely, if the SQ is located to the right of P l (III) , the pivot for leftward shifts, the outcome will be the ideal point of P l . If the SQ is located in the gridlock interval between P l and P r (II), the SQ will prevail, because there is no sufficient majority to move it in either direction. The origins of the compromise model can be traced to several formal and informal theories of bargaining [START_REF] Achen | Institutional Realism and Bargaining Models[END_REF], in particular to the exchange models proposed by [START_REF] Coleman | Foundations of Social Theory[END_REF]. He argued that decision-making is determined not only by the distribution of the preferences and the location of the SQ, as the pivot model would have it, but also by the intensities of these preferences (salience). [START_REF] Van Den Bos | Dutch EC Policy Making[END_REF] extended this notion to derive the compromise model, which is defined as: outcome = , where s i , v i and p i refer to, respectively, the salience, (voting) power and position of actor i. In effect, the compromise model is the mean of the positions of all actors involved in a decision weighted by their (voting) power and the intensity of their preferences. According to the model, the more powerful an actor is and the more importance he/she attaches to a decision (salience), the closer the outcome will be to his/her position. If an actor is not interested in a decision (s i = 0) or does not have any power (p i = 0), then the decision will be reached without taking his/her position into account. Following [START_REF] Thomson | Research Design: Measuring Actors' Positions, Saliences and Capabilities[END_REF], I use the Shapley-Shubik power index.

s v p s v i i i i i i n i n = = ∑
The exercise of influence is identified in the empirical analysis through the deviation of the actual outcome from the model prediction towards the ideal position of an actor. This is illustrated in Figure 3, which shows a one-dimensional policy space with the ideal position of seven member states (MS 1 to MS 7 ), the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission (COM). It also shows the location of the status quo (SQ) and the outcome (OUT). PM denotes the position of the pivotal member state.

In the example of Figure 3, the outcome is closer to the ideal position of MS 7 than we would expect given the prediction of the pivot model. Thus, MS 7 could have exercised disproportionate influence, possibly because it holds the Council Presidency. However, we also need to take the distinction between power and luck into account. Even if an outcome departs from the counterfactual towards the position of an actor, this might not be owing to the powers of this actor [START_REF] Barry | Democracy and Power[END_REF][START_REF] Dowding | Rational Choice and Political Power[END_REF]. As Dowding puts it: 'Just getting what you want is not enough to demonstrate power, for one may simply be lucky' (1996: 52). In the example of Figure 3 change in policy as a member state, we have to control for the possibility that it -rather than the member state -has been decisive in bringing about the outcome. A supranational actor supports the same policy change as a given member state if it agrees on the merits of the outcome relative to the SQ. This is the case if they are both on the same side of the midpoint (MP), which is defined as the point halfway between the SQ and the outcome (MP = (SQ + OUT)/2). If a supranational actor is on the same side of the midpoint as a member state, they are both in favour of adopting the new policy rather than sticking to the SQ because both of them would benefit from this particular change. In the example of Figure 3, a supranational actor occupying any position to the right of the midpoint (i.e. in the half-open interval ranging from the midpoint [excluded] to the right pole [included]) supports MS 7 . MS 7 has the support of the European Parliament but not of the Commission (COM). Thus, MS 7 might not have had a disproportionate influence on the decision outcome but could simply have been lucky.

Data

The empirical analysis presented in this article uses the data set gathered by the 'Decision-making in the European Union' project [START_REF] Thomson | Research Design: Measuring Actors' Positions, Saliences and Capabilities[END_REF]. The data set contains information on 66 legislative proposals and the decision outcome. All proposals were subject to either consultation or co-decision, were pending in 1999 and/or 2000, and raised some controversy.

As I will argue below, owing to the measurement technique used in gathering the DEU data set, comparisons of policy distances across issues could be misleading. Yet, existing empirical studies of the Council Presidency effect using the DEU data set are based on a direct comparison of policy distances across issues. [START_REF] Schalk | The Power of the Presidency in EU Council Decision-making[END_REF] fit the prediction of the compromise model to the data with one free parameter for the Presidency effect to see if the distances between the model prediction and the actual outcome are decreased by allowing for a Presidency effect. They also compare the mean distances across all issues between the ideal positions of an actor and the mean voter position, the Commission position and the actual outcome. [START_REF] Thomson | The Council Presidency in the European Union: Responsibility with Power[END_REF] dependent variable is the distance between member states' ideal positions and the actual outcome. His control variables include the distance between an actor's positions and the prediction of the compromise model.

The analysis presented in this paper is also based on the utility change relative to a counterfactual model prediction and controls for the discrepancy in actors' positions. However, the analysis proceeds on the issue level rather than comparing average values of policy distances across issues. Owing to the measurement technique used in gathering the DEU data, distances between (ideal-)points cannot be directly compared across issues. There are two reasons for this. First, the end poles have arbitrarily been assigned the same values (0, 100). Although they have been coded using the same numerical values, the extreme poles of the issue continua do not represent the same policies. Rather than labelling the end poles of all continua with the same numbers, different values could have been used for different policy issues. As a result, distances between policy positions cannot be compared directly across different issues.

The measurement of policy positions for the Socrates Directive (Steunenberg and [START_REF] Steunenberg | Testing Procedural Models of EU Legislative Decision-making[END_REF] can serve as a good illustration of this point. There were three issues, of which one referred to the level of funds and another referred to the terminology used. According to the scale imposed on the experts' judgements, a position of 0 implied no funding on the one dimension and the wording 'European Dimension of Education' on the other dimension, whereas a position of 100 implied assigning €2.5 billion to this policy and referring to a 'European Education Area'. It would be heroic to assume that the difference between no funding and €2.5 billion is equivalent to changing from the wording 'European Dimension of Education' to 'European Education Area' because both are equivalent to 100 units in the imposed policy space. Averaging policy distances across different issues is roughly analogous to calculating the mean profit for a multinational company across different currencies without accounting for the variation in the value of currencies. Obviously, a direct comparison of the values would lead to misleading conclusions.

Secondly, the range of possible values for policy distances varies across issues. The data set includes dichotomous issues. For these issues the range of values of utility change is restricted to two, owing to the binary nature of the decision. For continuous issues, in contrast, distance measures can take on a broader range of values. Thus, the values between the same distance measures might vary across issues not because the actor exercised a different amount of influence but rather because the number of feasible outcomes differs across issues. Furthermore, the range of values for utility change depends on the position of the actor. If the actor favours a position right in the middle between the two poles, his/her utility change has a maximum value of 50. If his/her position is at one of the extreme poles themselves, however, his/her utility change has a maximum value of 100 (Bueno de [START_REF] Bueno De Mesquita | Decision-Making Models, Rigor and New Puzzles[END_REF]. Thus, the analysis should proceed on the issue level to avoid treating values that represent de facto different policy distances as equal.

To calculate the counterfactual compromise model, which is a weighted arithmetic mean, the level of measurement has to be at least interval-scaled [START_REF] Blalock | Social Statistics[END_REF]. To derive the measurement of positions, experts were asked to identify the most extreme positions advocated on any given issue. Subsequently, they located the positions of political actors on a standardized issue continuum according to their estimate of the 'political distance' between the various positions and were asked to justify their assessment (Thomson and Stokman, 2006: 35-6). This data-gathering technique is similar to the rating questions familiar from survey research [START_REF] Fowler | Improving Survey Questions[END_REF], which typically yield interval-scaled responses [START_REF] Westermann | Empirical Tests of Scale Type for Individual Ratings[END_REF]. Thus, on each individual issue, the data can reasonably be treated as interval-scaled, which allows the calculation of the compromise model. Because the policy distances on each issue cannot be directly compared across issues, however, the overall analysis has to proceed on the issue level.

Table 1 describes the data. The unit of analysis is member state issue to compare across the performance of member states, some of which held the Presidency at various stages of the decision-making process. For each issue in a given proposal there are potentially 15 positions of member states, which form the basis of the analysis. I excluded from the analysis issues where the positions of more than two member states or information on the SQ or outcome were missing, as well as proposals that were not generally binding (decisions). For each of the 94 remaining issues, there are up to 15 member state positions, i.e. 1410 observations. The position of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK is represented in the data set for all 94 issues. For most of the other countries, their position on an issue is missing in one (Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden) or two cases (Finland, Greece). The position of Luxembourg, Austria and Ireland is missing in ten, nine and three cases respectively. Because of these missing data for individual country positions, 1381 observations will be used in the analysis. Decisions subject to the co-decision and consultation procedures are about equally represented in the data, as are directives and regulations. Most of the proposals were subject to qualified majority voting; 64% of the observations involved a new proposal that was not amending existing legislation. Member states often enjoyed the support of the supranational actors for their positions. The position of the European Parliament is missing in 22% of the cases; hence the multivariate analysis including a control variable for the support of the Parliament will be restricted to 1075 observations.

The data collected encompass proposals that were pending in 1999 and 2000. Two countries -Denmark and Greece -did not hold the Presidency at any stage of the decision-making process for the proposals under scrutiny. All other member states were involved as the Presidency in the decisionmaking at some stage. On average, member states were not involved in decision-making when holding the Presidency on about 70% of the issues for which their position is recorded. We can distinguish the involvement of a member state as the Council Presidency during the introduction of a proposal by the Commission, when political agreement was reached in the Council (during the first reading), during the final stages of the legislative process, and during other time periods in between. In the empirical analysis, dummy variables are used to denote if a member state held the Presidency at these stages of the legislative process of a given proposal. Under co-decision, political agreement in the Council in the first reading is an important step towards the final act because the discussions in subsequent readings are based on it. Under consultation, some time might pass between political agreement and the formal adoption of an act in the Council because the latter sometimes involves clarification of language issues. Thus, political agreement might be achieved under one Presidency but the formal adoption falls under another one. Including a separate category for political agreement allows us to control for this effect. To code involvement during the final stages, the date of the signature was used. Hence, a member state is coded as being involved as the Presidency in the final stages when a bill was signed into law by the Council (or Council and Parliament in the case of co-decision) during its time in office. Other time periods refer to the times during which an issue was pending but it was neither introduced, decided upon in the first reading nor adopted.

In the 31% of observations in which a member state was involved as the Presidency, it was mainly while the proposal was just pending (44%). During its term in office a member state was nearly as often involved when a bill was introduced (21%) as during the final stages (22%). In 13% of the cases, a member state held the Presidency when a political agreement was reached in the first reading. There is some overlap between these categories. Particularly in the consultation procedure, the final adoption of a law and political agreement might fall under the same Presidency. In 39 instances, a member state held the Presidency both when a political agreement was reached in the first reading and during the final stages of decision-making. In 5 cases, a member state held the Presidency during the introduction, the first reading agreement and the signature of a bill.

Results

In order to investigate the effects of the Council Presidency empirically, I compare the performance of an ordinary member state with that of member states that held the Presidency during the legislative negotiations. The question is whether or not a member state benefits from holding office. A member state successfully exercises disproportionate influence if the outcome is closer to its ideal position than the model prediction. If member states benefit from the powers of the Presidency, they should make disproportionate gains relative to counterfactual models more often when they are in the chair. If the Presidency is a burden, requiring the member state at the helm to make extraordinary concessions, the reverse should be true. Finally, the office of the Presidency might not have any impact on the influence a member state can exercise with regard to decision outcomes, in which case it fares neither better nor worse when in office.

Besides the support of the European Parliament and the Commission, the regression analysis introduces control variables for the legislative procedure, voting threshold, type of proposal (legal form, new/amending) and salience. Note that the measurement based on counterfactuals already includes the voting weights (or voting power in the case of the compromise model) of a member state. The compromise model also includes the importance (salience) an actor attributes to a given issue. To account for other characteristics of a member state, control variables (fixed effects) for the member states are included in all of the calculations. Observations within the same proposal are not completely independent of each other. To take this into account, robust standard errors have been used.

Table 2 presents the results of the logistic regression. The dependent variable is coded 1 if the utility of a member state increased relative to the prediction of the bargaining model. Models 1 to 5 are estimated for the prediction of the pivot model; the remaining estimates are based on the compromise model. In a first step (Models 1 and 6) only dummy variables for the Presidency have been included, distinguishing between a member state at the helm during the introduction of a proposal, when political agreement was reached in the Council in the first reading, during the signing of the final act, or during other time periods in which the proposal was pending (see above for details on coding). In a second step (Models 2 and 7), control variables for the support of supranational actors were added. These dummy variables are coded 1 if the member state has the support of the European Commission or the European Parliament, respectively. Support is coded as described in the Research design section. The other regression models include additional control variables for the legislative procedure, voting threshold in the Council, type of proposal and whether or not a proposal is new.

Consultation is coded as 1 if the proposal is subject to the consultation procedure and 0 if it is subject to co-decision. A proposal can be decided upon in the Council either by QMV (= 1) or by unanimity. The proposals in the data set are either directives (= 1) or regulations. Furthermore, some proposals present new legislation (=1) whereas others amend existing laws. Salience captures the importance of an issue on a scale ranging from 0 to 100. A score of 100 indicates that an issue is of the highest importance to an actor. A score of 50 denotes a situation in which, according to the expert interviewed, an actor would use arguments but not power to change the outcome.

In the data set, the values for salience range from 5 to 100. The mean lies at 60 (standard deviation = 22), and 59% of observations have a value higher than 50. In all of the estimations based on the pivot model predictions (Models 1 to 5), holding the Presidency during the final stages of negotiations yields a positive effect that is statistically significant at the 1% level. The same is true for the support of both supranational actors. Controlling for all the other factors, a member state is more likely to win under consultation, on directives and when discussing a proposal that is important to the member state. All of these variables are statistically significant at the 1% level. So is the effect of the voting threshold. The variable new is not statistically significant once salience is included in the estimation.

Holding the Presidency during the final act of legislative decisionmaking is also beneficial according to the estimations based on the compromise model (Models 6 to 10). The coefficient is positive and statistically significant at the 5% level (Model 6 at the 10% level). 1 In line with earlier studies on the impact of the supranational actors on legislative outcomes, the only other variable that consistently yields statistically significant estimates is the support of the Commission. The coefficient is positive and has a p-value below .01.

To appreciate the substantive effect of holding office during the final stages of negotiations, we can calculate the probability of success based on the regression estimates (Table 3). Based on Model 5, the probability of an ordinary member state without Commission support benefiting more from a decision than predicted by the pivot model is 14.5%. The calculations are based on mean values for all control variables and no (additional) involvement as Presidency during the introduction, first reading agreement or other time periods. This value increases by 16.3% if a member state holds the Council Presidency during the final act. In comparison, having the support of the Commission increases the success rate by 17.9%. Similarly, calculations based on the compromise model (Model 10) estimate an increase of 15.5% due to holding office. The difference to the increase due to Commission support (21.7%) is more pronounced in this case.

To distinguish between the effects of the Council Presidency and supranational actors across different legislative procedures more clearly, I also calculated separate regressions for cases involving co-decision or consultation (Table 4). Models 1 and 2 are based on cases decided by consultation; Models 3 and 4 are based on co-decision cases. The variables are identical to the ones discussed above. Again, the results show that member states benefit from holding the Presidency during the final stages of the proceedings. The coefficients are significant at the 10% level (Models 2 and 4) and 5% level (Models 1 and 3). Also, having the support of the supranational actors has a statistically significant effect. Unlike the pooled analysis, the regression analysis by legislative procedure yields consistently statistically significant results for the support of the European Parliament for both counterfactuals. However, the coefficient for the European Parliament changes signs in one of the models (4). Models 1 and 4 yield evidence of a (negative) Presidency effect during time periods other than the final stages. However, this is not confirmed by the analysis of the same cases based on the other counterfactual model.

Overall, the multivariate analysis based on the counterfactual research strategy yields substantive support for the hypothesis of a powerful Presidency. However, this is limited to member states holding the Presidency

Conclusion

The rotating Presidency is a notable feature of the Council of the European Union. It has been argued that the powers of the Presidency allow a member state to exercise an extraordinary amount of influence during its term in office. However, it has also been noted that the visibility of the Presidency might force the member state holding it to make more sacrifices than usual to reach agreements. Two quantitative studies established the power of the Presidency at the adoption stage. This study confirms this result using a different methodology to measure power and to distinguish between power and luck. Building directly on the definition of power, I calculated a counterfactual outcome using two bargaining models. An actor was deemed to be potentially powerful if the actual outcome was closer to its ideal position than the counterfactual. This also goes some way towards establishing the distinction between power and luck. A decision outcome might be closer to the ideal position of an actor not owing to its powers but rather because it was lucky enough to have preferences similar to those of the decisive actor. For the other member states, this is already accounted for in the calculation of the counterfactual outcome. The supranational actors cannot be included in the same manner because their involvement in legislative decision-making is different. I calculated a measure for the support of the European Parliament and the Commission based on the similarity of preferences for policy change between the supranational actor and the member state. Owing to the measurement technique used in gathering the data, the analysis had to proceed at the issue level. Besides the support of supranational actors, the regression analysis includes control variables for the legislative procedure, the voting threshold, the type of proposal, whether or not a proposal was new or amending legislation, and salience. The regression analysis shows that holding the Presidency during the final stage of legislative proceedings has a positive and statistically significant effect. The increase in the probability of an outcome closer than expected owing to holding the Presidency is similar to that resulting from having the support of the Commission. Further research is needed to investigate what mechanism explains the influence of the Presidency during the final stages of the legislative negotiations. The absence of a robust effect for member states holding the Presidency during the introduction of a proposal points against effective framing of the issues by the Presidency or the accommodation of the Presidency's preferences by the Commission. Indeed, this study corroborates earlier findings on the influence of the Commission in legislative decisionmaking. However, further research is needed to delineate the causal direction between the support of the Commission and the utility gains from decision outcomes by the Presidency. Procedural prerogatives in the Council should have been effective during the first reading agreement in the Council or during other time periods, as well as in the final stages. Thus, the findings suggest that the Presidency mainly benefits from an informational asymmetry and time pressure in the final stages of negotiations. Indeed, the Presidency might influence the timing of decisions rather than the outcomes.

After it has been established that member states benefit disproportionately from decision outcomes reached during their Presidency, the challenge for future research is to delineate more precisely which of the theoretical causal mechanisms underlies this empirical finding.

Notes

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the research workshop of the European Legislative Politics Research Group (www.elprg.eu) at the European University Institute in Florence in March 2007 and at the research colloquium of the Institute for Governance Studies, University of Twente, in November 2007. I am particularly grateful for valuable comments by Jan Rasmus Böhnke, Torun Dewan, Keith Dowding, Peter Geurts, Simon Hix, Bjorn Hoyland, Henk van der Kolk, Björn Lindberg, Anne Rasmussen, Martin Rosema, Arndt Wonka and three anonymous referees.

1

I also calculated models including the interaction terms of various control variables (support of Commission, support of Parliament, QMV, salience, new, directive) with the dummy variable for holding the Presidency during the final stages of negotiations. The interaction terms were added to the specification of Models 5 and 10. None of the interaction terms was statistically significant at the 10% level. The main finding is also robust with respect to changes in the order in which the control variables are included in the regression analysis.

Figure 1

 1 Figure 1The Pivotal Actor and Decision Outcomes.

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 Prediction of Decision Outcomes based on the Pivot Model.

Figure 3

 3 Figure 3 Measuring Power.

(

  standard errors in parenthesis. All models include fixed effects for member states. *of utility relative to model prediction 0 = No increase of utility relative to model prediction

Table 1

 1 Descriptive Statistics

		Consultation Codecision	Missing	Total
	Legislative Procedure	703 (51%)	678 (49%)	0	1,381 (100%)
		QMV	Unanimity	Missing	Total
	Voting threshold	1,014 (73%)	367 (27%)	0	1,381 (100%)
		Directive	Regulation	Missing	Total
	Legal form	647 (47%)	734 (53%)	0	1,381 (100%)
		New	Amending	Missing	Total
	Type of proposal	877 (64%)	504 (37%)	0	1,381 (100%)
	Support by	Yes	No	Missing	Total
	Commission	841 (61%)	510 (37%)	30 (2%)	1,381 (100%)
	Parliament	680 (49%)	395 (29%)	306 (22%)	1,381 (100%)

Table 2

 2 Results of Logistic Regression Analysis

	(10)			.06		.185	(.279)	-.195	(.308)	.682	(.308)**	-.089	(.253)	.933	(.148)***	.065	(.142)	.071	(.156)	-.307	(.162)*	.117	(.161)	.131
	(9)			.06		.148	(.278)	-.193	(.306)	.701	(.304)**	-.147	(.249)	1.019	(.146)***	.103	(.141)	.161	(.153)	-.144	(.156)	.229	(.156)	.078
	(8)	Compromise	Model	.06		.161	(.278)	-.182	(.307)	.703	(.301)**	-.098	(.251)	1.024	(.144)***	.102	(.140)	.053	(.133)	-.245	(.141)*
	(7)			.06		.154	(.277)	-.193	(.305)	.696	(.299)**	-.131	(.241)	1.014	(.141)***	.104	(.139)
	(6)			.01		.148	(.23)	-.13	(.257)	.453	(.242)*	-.068	(.179)
	(5)			.13		.306	(.296)	-.536	(.368)	.963	(.326)***	.019	(.268)	1.04	(.168)***	.561	(.168)***	.697	(.177)***	-.504	(.180)***	.861	(.182)***	.199	(.171)
	(4)			.11		.291	(.29)	-.54	(.347)	.895	(.319)***	.132	(.266)	.999	(.167)***	.514	(.163)***	.634	(.173)***	-.615	(.170)***	.799	(.176)***	.426	(.164)***
	(3)	Pivot	Model	.09		.44	(.29)	-.496	(.349)	.906	(.312)***	.314	(.274)	.99	(.166)***	.492	(.159)***	.187	(.145)	-.938	(.157)***
	(2)			.06		.398	(.278)	-.522	(.331)	.858	(.301)***	.191	(.255)	.937	(.162)***	.477	(.156)***
	(1)			.01		.571	(.238)**	-.369	(.286)	.671	(.257)***	.156	(.189)
	Model	Prediction		Pseudo R 2	Member State held Presidency during	Introduction		First reading		Final act		Other time periods	Support for Member State Position by	Commission		Parliament	Other control variables	Consultation		QMV		Directive	New

Table 4

 4 Results of Logistic Regression Analysis by Legislative Procedure No increase of utility relative to model predictionduring the final stages of negotiations. The substantial effect is significant and is more or less equivalent to having the support of the Commission.

		(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
	Procedure	Consultation	Codecision
	Counterfactual	Pivot	Compromise Pivot	Compromise
	Pseudo R 2	.15	.17	.18	.07
	Member State held Council Presidency during
	Introduction	.283	.510	.501	-.022
		(.466)	(.454)	(.446)	(.393)
	First reading	-1.175	-1.111	-.109	.179
		(.683)*	(.692)	(.492)	(.443)
	Final act	1.412	1.272	1.089	.748
		(.672)**	(.696)*	(.437)**	(.402)*
	Other time periods	.228	.719	.028	-.583
		(.527)	(.696)	(.354)	(.279)**
	Support for Member State Position by
	Commission	.638	1.427	1.529	.593
		(.239)***	(.226)***	(.280)***	(.215)***
	Parliament	.578	.752	.639	-.513
		(.267)**	(.231)***	(.227)***	(.202)**
	Other control variables
	QMV	-.710	-1.232	-.626	.739
		(.256)***	(.243)***	(.284)**	(.254)***
	Directive	.499	-.233	.461	.280
		(.327)	(.326)	(.263)*	(.223)
	New	-.481	-.101	1.177	.417
		(.276)*	(.253)	(.304)***	(.235)*
	Salience	.025	-.0054	.006	-.003
		(.005)***	(.005)	(.005)	(.004)
	Observations	483	483	558	558
	Notes: Robust standard errors in parentheses. All models include fixed effects for member states.
	*** = p < 0.01, ** = p < 0.05, * = p < 0.1
	Dependent Variable
	1 = Increase of utility relative to model prediction
	0 =

European Union Politics 9(3)

Warntjen The Council Presidency: Power Broker or Burden? An Empirical Analysis