"Committee work in the European Parliament: The distribution of rapporteurships among party groups and national delegations"

Mamadouh, Virginie and Raunio, Tapio. (2001) "Committee work in the European Parliament: The distribution of rapporteurships among party groups and national delegations". In: UNSPECIFIED, Madison, Wisconsin. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The paper analyses the distribution of reports and rapporteurships in the 1989-99 European Parliament among party groups and national delegations. The data consists of all reports and rapporteurships in the third (1989-94) and fourth (1994-99) Parliament and of interviews with committee staff. We show that the size of a group predicts well its share of the reports. Correlations coefficients between the number of members in a group and the number of reports they produced are very high, generally over .950. Party groups are, within certain limits, willing to make trade-offs and to cede reports to smaller groups, but on the whole they compete hard over the reports in order to influence the EU policy process. The procedures for allocating committee chairs (d'Hondt system), committee seats (proportionality rule), and reports (points system based on groups' share of seats) can be interpreted as mechanisms for the party groups to control the committees in a situation where the former are relatively weak (compared to European national parliaments). The two largest groups, PSE and PPE, control legislative reports. There is considerable variation in the distribution of rapporteurships between national delegations. Scattered distribution over several groups, with weak presence in the core groups, correlates positively with low report production.

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