Abstract
The chapter focuses on how multilevel governance affects interstitial institutional change in decision-making in the EU. Interstitial institutional change occurs if formal institutional rules are ambiguous, and in consequence, when applied, are renegotiated by actors. Each concerned actor seeks to strengthen its own institutional power in these renegotiations in order to influence policy outcomes. This leads to an informal institutional change between formal treaty revisions. Héritier argues that MLG and multi-arena governance offer additional opportunities for actors to strengthen their institutional powers in the re-negotiation of incomplete formal rules during implementation, but may also set limits to such endeavours. The chapter analyses in three cases of European politics, the nomination and investiture of the Commission President, the nomination and investiture of individual Commissioners and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, the conditions in which multilevel and multi-arena strategies of the European Parliament bring about an informal interstitial institutional change. All these cases imply a power shift between European institutional actors in favour of the parliament.
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Notes
- 1.
Authors share similar assumptions of rational behaviour to explain the empowerment of the EP. However, their work focuses exclusively on the role of member states in the shaping of formal treaty rules. By contrast, we focus on the role of the EP in changing formal and informal institutional rules.
- 2.
Assuming bounded rationality implies that when actors design institutional rules (contracts), they are unable to take into account every relevant contingency. Decisions are time-consuming and costly.
- 3.
An arena is a formal decision-making setting with its formally competent decision-makers deciding on an issue or a number of issues at a specific point in time. In our cases we focus on a treaty shaping arena and an intergovernmental arena. In other work we focused on legislative arenas deciding under co-decision on legislative issues.
- 4.
This Section is based on Héritier et al. (2018).
- 5.
The Eurosceptic right-wing Euro-parties, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR) and the Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy did not nominate any candidate.
- 6.
This section is based on Hériter et al. (2018).
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Héritier, A. (2019). Hidden Power Shifts: Multilevel Governance and Interstitial Institutional Change in Europe. In: Behnke, N., Broschek, J., Sonnicksen, J. (eds) Configurations, Dynamics and Mechanisms of Multilevel Governance. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05511-0_19
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