Abstract
The aim of this book is the empirical evaluation of Brussels’ influence on domestic legislatures. The previous chapters have empirically determined the amount of legislative activities at the EU level, which potentially impact the activities in the domestic legislatures. Formally, we saw that the EU has deepened the relationships among the member states during the last 30 years by extending the policy competencies to additional policy areas and expanding qualified majority voting in the Council with the participation of the European Parliament. These changes were performed by treaty revisions and intended to facilitate and legitimate the adoption of Commission proposals. At the same time, the EU has increased the number of member states from nine to 27 countries, starting with Southern enlargement in the beginning of the 1980s, followed by the Northern round in the mid-1990s, and most recently the Eastern enlargements in the beginning of this century.
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- 1.
Legally, only those rules should be considered as tertiary legislation whose legality directly depends on rules of secondary legislation, but this is not the case when secondary legislation empowers the Commission to enact further legislation. Such delegated legislation, made at the time when the Commission has been authorized to do so, remains in force when secondary legislation granting the power is withdrawn.
- 2.
Huber and Shipan (2002:183–185) suggest that ministers dominate the parliamentary and the executive process. In parliamentary legislation, the minister is responsible for preparing the initial proposal. However, at this stage, a minister is often constrained by other members of the cabinet because the initial proposal is usually discussed in cabinet and requires approval before sending it to the floor. Compared to the parliamentary process, ministers are less closely monitored in executive matters. They are the head of department and define the guidelines of how policy should be implemented by an agency.
- 3.
For the allocation of the different MRG categories to the left-right dimension we follow Lowe et al. William (2011).
- 4.
A specific case applies for minority governments. Since minority government need additional votes in the parliament for the approval of their legislative proposal we calculated the distance between the required opposition party and the most extreme governmental party. For single party majority governments this procedure results in a policy distance of zero, which is consistent with our theory.
- 5.
The formal definition of our dependent variable also leads to missing values in cases where, in a given year and policy area, zero laws were adopted by a country. In such cases we replaced the missing values with zero.
- 6.
The applied log-odds transformation requires us to replace the minimum values of 0 to 0.01 and all maximum values of 1 to 0.99.
- 7.
Alternative estimation methods include pooled OLS or standard maximum likelihood. However both estimation methods possess certain weaknesses when applied in a multilevel framework. Pooled OLS would yield consistent and unbiased estimates of the model coefficients but their standard errors would be biased. The standard maximum likelihood estimation procedure ignores the loss of degrees of freedom due to the regression coefficients in estimating the variance components.
- 8.
The deviance is defined as −2 times the log-likelihood; that is −2 times the logarithm of the probability of the data given the estimated model parameters.
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König, T., Mäder, L. (2012). Going Beyond: Causes of Europeanization. In: Brouard, S., Costa, O., König, T. (eds) The Europeanization of Domestic Legislatures. Studies in Public Choice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1502-2_12
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