Transparency vs. Efficiency? A Study of Negotiations in the Council of the European Union
Year: 2014
Type: preprint
Abstract: The existing literature has concluded that transparency in legislative politics often comes at the expense of efficiency. This paper challenges this conclusion as it explores whether a series of initiatives to increase the public’s access to information on legislative decision-making in the Council of the European Union have had an impact on the legislative process in terms of 1) governments’ ability to reach agreements, and 2) on the duration of the negotiation process. The paper presents a bargaining model where one particular kind of transparency, namely the publication of votes and decision records, works to overcome problems of uncertainty and incomplete information. The paper also presents empirical findings from a dataset covering all legislative activities in the Council from January 1999 to December 2013, as well as material from 23 interviews with government ministers and senior civil servants in the Council secretariat and national representations in Brussels. The paper finds that increased the publication of votes and decision records does not lead to gridlock in Council decision-making, nor has it prolonged the decision process. On the contrary, the results indicate that the public recording of governments’ positions and legislative agreements.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Authors: Hartmut Lenz, Sara Hagemann
Institution: London School of Economics and Political Science
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3125926536