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When and how does public opinion affect the delegation choices of legislators in the EU? We argue the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers limit the discretion of the Commission in response to EU-wide scepticism and politicisation of EU policies. Public opposition to EU policies, their contestation, and potential scrutiny motivate the EU legislators to minimise the discrepancies between the adopted and implemented policies. They do so to avoid bearing the costs of disregarding public preferences over the level of EU integration. Our analysis of legislation adopted between 2009–2019 relying on a novel dataset on public policy preferences and agency discretion supports this expectation. The results offer evidence of previously unexplored responsiveness of the EU institutions emerging in the policy implementation that might entail efficiency losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research largely agrees that to minimize ministerial drift, political parties in multiparty governments tend to use parliamentary committees to monitor each other. Particularly, they strive to chair parliamentary committees corresponding to ministerial departments to keep tabs on their ruling partners. Yet, policing ministerial activities through a chair-based monitoring system requires perfect correspondence of jurisdictions between ministries and committees. We suggest that when perfect correspondence is absent, ministerial parties may strategically circumvent committee oversight. Specifically, motivated by policy preference divergence with the coalition partner, ministers can draft proposals to make their referral to a friendlier committee more likely than referral to a hostile watchdog committee chaired by the partner. Our analysis of committee referrals of over 2800 ministerial proposals from the Finnish Eduskunta (2001–2015) confirms this expectation. The results, therefore, bring important new insights to our understanding of parliamentary scrutiny and partner oversight under coalition governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties' incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills' scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU has powerful enforcement mechanisms to curb democratic backsliding and support the rule of law in its member states. While (the threat of) enforcement is necessary, sanctions might be difficult to accept as legitimate when they hurt a citizen's country. We study the perceived legitimacy of EU enforcement actions. We develop hypotheses about the influence of national identity, party support, procedural fairness, descriptive norm prevalence, and the likely effects of the sanctions on the future of cooperation. These hypotheses are tested with a survey experiment administered to a nationally-representative sample in Poland. The focus is on the substantial financial sanctions imposed by the EU concerning judicial independence. The results show that exclusive national identity, the perceived importance of the rule of law, support for European integration and party support are strongly associated with perceived legitimacy. Providing information about the prevalence of public support for judicial independence in the country increases significantly the perceived legitimacy of enforcement actions. We find no evidence for effects of arguments about Polexit, future deterrence effects of the sanctions or their procedural (un)fairness. EU sanctions might not lead to further backlash among the domestic public, but they are unlikely to generate public pressure for reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]