"Supranational Institution Building in the European Union: A Comparison of the European Court of Justice and the European Central Bank"

Richmond, Amy and Heisengerg, Dorothee. (1999) "Supranational Institution Building in the European Union: A Comparison of the European Court of Justice and the European Central Bank". In: UNSPECIFIED, Pittsburgh, PA. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The completion of the new supranational ECB provides an opportunity to compare how the EU builds new institutions. On the face of it, the two institutions now have a similar status, however, the creation of the ECJ was very different than that of the ECB. This paper looks comparatively at the two institutions and asks how the workings of these institutions have been affected by the initial mandate. Concretely, we examine the path the ECJ has taken to becoming an important EU actor, and compare that to the path that created the ECB. Will the ECB give rise to a literature similar to the ECJ about the institution’s independence from Member State interference (Burley and Mattli, Garrett, Atler), or does the ECB’s explicit mandate (price stability above all), institutional structure (strict independence), and delineated scope preclude any suggestion that the ECB considers the wishes of important Member States when it makes monetary policy? We examine four aspects of institutional design which may have significant impact on the institutional functioning of the two supranational institutions: 1) intentionality (did the Member States intend to create a supranational institution), 2) specificity (how concrete is the mandate of the institution), 3) relationship to national institution (how much does the supranational institution depend on its national counterpart), and 4) institutional copying (is the supranational institution explicitly modeled on a specific national institution). We find that each of these elements has significant implications for the institutions' stability and their ability to carry out their respective mandates.

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