Democratic Legitimacy in the EU: Inside the 'Black Box' of Informal Trilogues

Can the EU govern efficiently and with the people? Almost all EU legislation is now agreed in an early stage, facilitated by informal 'trilogue' negotiations in which a small number of representatives of three EU institutions bargain behind closed doors and present the agreement for approval in public meetings. We examine the complex dynamics of this 'black box' and assess the ability of EU institutions to bargain successfully, to foster or preclude political contestation, to create political coalitions across institutions, and avoid capture by special interests. We do this by combining, first, a comprehensive, large-scale analysis of patterns of trilogue negotiations, tracing systematically the evolution of Council and EP preferences in order to determine their respective bargaining success (package 1, Netherlands project team); second, in-depth process-tracing studies to explore what happens when issues with high political stakes enter the world of trilogues, i.e we examine the conditions under which informal trilogues affect bargaining success by looking at intra- and extra-institutional actors and their strategies to manage information flows (package 2, UK project team) and explore how both mainstream and Eurosceptic and/or radical political groups mediate cross-institutional contestation (package 3, German project team). A fourth section (package 4) will bring these findings together to explain how patterns of contestation affect the evolution of preferences during the course of legislative negotiations (all project teams).

Almost all EU legislation is now agreed in an early stage, facilitated by informal 'trilogue' negotiations in which representatives of three EU institutions bargain in secluded settings. We assess the ability of EU institutions to bargain successfully in trilogues, to create political coalitions across institutions, avoid capture by special interests, and the extent to which trilogues foster or preclude political contestation. Work package 1 (Netherlands) records the changing preferences of EU institutions during the course of trilogue negotiations, and feeds this information on a continuous basis into other work packages. These examine the conditions under which informal trilogues affect bargaining success by looking at intra- and extra-institutional actors and their strategies to manage information flows (work package 2, UK) and explore how both mainstream and Eurosceptic and/or radical political groups mediate cross-institutional contestation (work package 3, Germany).

Despite reforms to the trilogue process and mechanisms of pluralist oversight developed within the participating institutions, the role of trilogues as a de facto modus operandi of producing legislation, together with their secluded nature, has been the subject of extensive and long-standing contestation, reflected in coverage from EU specialist news outlets (e.g.EurActiv, European Observer, Politico) and wider media (e.g. International New York Times), as well as from civil society organisations such as Statewatch and Transparency International (Roederer-Rynning & Greenwood, 2015). The potential for public impact of this research is also apparent from the decision of the European Ombudsman in May 2015 to open an investigation into the transparency of trilogues and the balance between efficiency and accountability, features which underpin the research investigation. The enquiry was accompanied by a public event in the European Parliament in September 2015 with other keynote speakers from, inter alia, civil society organisations and public affairs consultancies, EU institutions, and journalists. At the event, the Ombudsman reflected that 'I anticipate that as greater scrutiny and awareness of EU law-making becomes inevitable, I am likely to receive more transparency complaints in this area', and identified a question within the specific remit of work-package 2: 'Is there a risk that greater transparency, at the wrong time, will simply provide greater lobbying opportunities for well-resourced private interests to the detriment of the average citizen? Or slow down the process or bring it to a halt entirely in some cases?'

These foci provide clear indications as to the beneficiaries from the research, comprising both the general public and specialised audiences. The wider public have a core expectation that political institutions will reflect contestation in civil society, and to do so under conditions which provide for clear accountability to them for which transparency is a pre-condition. More specialised audiences are: policy-makers from EU institutions, who have developed intra-institutional mechanisms of pluralist oversight over trilogue arrangements in recent years and who continue to develop these those who provide supporting resources to them; institutions providing supervisory oversight of EU policy making, including member state governments and legislatures (the UK House of Lords conducted its own specific enquiry in 2009); political groups and parties; EU related think tanks; territorial government, and civil society organisations from a variety of segments, ranging from producer related (business, the professions, trade unions, consumer) and other advocacy organisations (e.g. NGOs, social movements), who frequently raise issues involving the transparency of trilogues but report different degrees of engagement with them.