Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper applies a principal-agent model to the study of (informal) trialogue negotiations in the EU. More in particular, the presented double principal-agent model aims to analyse the discretion of the rotating Presidency of the Council and the rapporteur of the European Parliament in such negotiations. In trialogue meetings, representatives of the Council and the EP meet to reach so-called 'fast track legislation' (or 'early agreements'). Both at the side of the Council and the EP, the task to reach an agreement between the two institutions is delegated from the entire institution (the principals) to one actor representing that institution (the agents, i.e. the Presidency for the Council and the rapporteur for the EP). These representatives not only have the task to reach a deal in the trialogue meetings, but they also need the support of the institution they represent to accept that deal afterwards. This means that the principals retain an ultimate sanctioning mechanism, namely rejecting the deal that their agent negotiated on their behalf. As the link between intra- and inter-institutional relations still remains largely understudied, the innovative aspect of the proposed principal-agent model is that it takes into account two principal-agent relations, which come together in the (informal) trialogues. Hence, it examines how and to what extent these two principal-agent relations influence each other. In addition to the theoretical model, the paper presents original empirical findings on the principal-agent relations in (informal) trialogues drawn from the case study of a recent fast-track agreement in the environmental domain.