Pares inter pares? The bargaining success of the commission, the council, and the parliament in European Union legislative negotiations

This research note tries to determine how politically successful the Council, the Commission, and the European Parliament are in the area of EU legislative decision-making. After reviewing the literature, a research design is presented which incorporates information on the policy preferences of the different institutional actors for 70 recent EU legislative decisions that were negotiated under the consultation and the codecision procedure. We use correlation and OLS regression to analyze the distances between what the EU institutional actors want and what they eventually get out of the process. The findings of the analysis are that (1) the preference profiles of the three actors are rather dissimilar, and that (2) the success rates of the Council are higher than the rates of the Commission and Parliament.