Institute of Political Science and International Relations

We are happy to announce that Dr. Adam Kirpsza published an article entitled Time is of the essence: Explaining the duration of European Union lawmaking under the co-decision procedure in “International Political Science Review”. The article analyzes factors affecting the speed of adopting EU legislative acts under the co-decision procedure (currently the ordinary legislative procedure), the main procedure for enacting legislation in the European Union. "International Political Science Review" is a peer-reviewed journal published by IPSA (International Political Science Association) and indexed in SCOPUS and Web of Science. It has a 2020 impact factor of 2.049 and is placed in the first quartile (Q1) of the best political science journals in the world (according to SCOPUS).

We encourage you to read it!

Abstract

The article explores factors affecting the duration of the co-decision procedure (currently the ordinary legislative procedure), the main procedure for adopting legislation in the European Union. Drawing from rational choice institutionalism, it expects the speed of co-decision to be determined by three attributes: the impatience of legislators, issue linkage and the characteristics of Council and European Parliament negotiators (relais actors). The hypotheses are tested using survival analysis on a dataset of 599 controversial legislative acts submitted and enacted under co-decision between 1999 and 2009. The results show that co-decision proposals are decided faster when they are urgent, negotiated prior to the European Parliament elections and concluded through single proposal logrolls. By contrast, multi-proposal packages and the ideological distance between relais actors prolong decision-making. Overall, the article contributes to the literature by showing that the impatience of legislators, package deals and the properties of negotiators are relevant drivers of co-decision duration.