Agenda-setting, concession-trading or problem-solving? The institutional origins of EU legislation

In legislative policy-making several institutions need to agree upon the same text in order to adopt legislation. This means that these institutions must find a way to reconcile their initial disagreements. In the EU, the Council and the European Parliament (EP) are the co-legislators, which must find a compromise based on a proposal by the Commission. This paper aims at identifying the routes through which the positions of the co-legislators are integrated into a single legislative compromise. We identify three non-exclusive routes that lead to a legislative compromise: (1) anticipating of the co-legislators’ positions by the agenda setter; (2) exchanging concessions between the co-legislators; and (3) creatively searching for new solutions in the interinstitutional negotiations. We then examine the extent to which each route is used in the EU legislative decision-making, whether variation exists across legislative files and whether patterns can be identified. We develop a text-mining technique which computes in which institutional positions each word of an adopted legislative act originally appears. The results of the analysis indicate which percentage of a legislative act emanates from, respectively, the Commission’s proposal, the EP’s position, the Council’s position, or was added during trilogue negotiations. We apply our technique to identify the institutional origin of all legislative acts negotiated in trilogues between 2012 and 2018 (n=278). Subsequently, we examine whether we can identify certain patterns across legislative files in the result