Paper Titles & Abstracts

Coalition formation between the EP and the Council of the EU takes place on an issue-by-issue basis. This raises the research question of why and how concurrent winning majorities are formed across the two chambers. The leading model of EU legislative politics, the compromise model, leaves underspecified the causal mechanism leading to outcomes, which has brought the investigation of micro-mechanisms of coalition formation across the EP and Council to the forefront of the research agenda. This paper investigates the role of 'formateurs' within the chambers, the EP rapporteur and the Council Presidency, in the formation of majority coalitions. Decision-making can take place in line with two scenarios. First, formateurs can form an intra-institutional coalition and then enter into inter-institutional negotiations on behalf of their chamber. Second, they can form a trans-institutional coalition between individual legislators across institutional boundaries. Each scenario results in a coalition that consists of different actors and, thus, excludes other potential coalition members. The paper argues that formateurs enable and influence the outcome of bicameral decision-making between the Council and the EP by proposing a log-roll across institutional boundaries that is supported by a trans-institutional coalition. Formateurs determine which of multiple equilibria is chosen. Therefore, they are at the core of a possible micro-mechanism of coalition formation. Drawing on a new dataset, the paper finds the circumstances under which formateurs enter into trans-institutional cooperation.