We formulate a game-theoretical model of closed rule legislation in the presence of informational asymmetries. In the model an agenda setter with private information proposes a policy to a legislature. The legislature appoints an oversight committee to monitor the agenda setter. We study the...

This paper challenges the assumption of separable preferences that has been applied throughout the existing empirical research on European Union (EU) legislative politics. Yet our analysis reveals that non-separable preferences are in fact a widespread phenomenon in EU politics. In many cases...

Since the European Union is a law-intensive organization, growth of EU activity can best be assessed by the growth of regulation rather than by growth in expenditure or personnel. Moreover, the character of EU decision-making means that traditional explanations of policy growth have to be...

This paper attempts to explain why it was that the countries of the European Community came together to form a political union in the early 1990s. The explanations most often invoked to explain this process - those drawn from competing schools in international relations and federalism theory -...

In this paper we propose a new method to evaluate the distribution of power between decision-making bodies in the European Union. Conventional methods that measure the voting power of players, such as the Banzhaf, Johnston, Holler and Shapley-Shubik indices, are insufficient for this purpose....

Literature on international organizations points to several potential sources of bargaining power: voice, exit, and exclusion. In some circumstances, a member state may be able to effectively voice objections to a change to an organization's institutions. In others, it may threaten to leave the...

In the paper by Matthias Sutter a discrepancy between his results and earlier results on fair allocation of voting weights in the EU Council was found. In this paper, we explain the source of this discrepancy.

In this paper we argue that spatial voting games and power index models are not necessarily exclusive ways to analyse EU decision-making. We find that the two main criticisms pointed out by scholars of spatial voting games, namely that power indices do not take into account preferences or the...

This article develops a formal model of the politics of delegation in the European Union (EU) incorporating key institutional features: the legislative-executive role of the Commission, the legislative-executive role of the members of the Council of Ministers, the possible implementation of...

Jan-Erik Lane and Sven Berg, and Manfred Holler and Mika Widgrén, agree that power index analysis of the EU cannot take into account its institutional structure. For us, this is a sufficient condition for its failure as a research program. Nonetheless, they go on to argue that power indices are...