10:00 - 11:30
Panel Session 3
Room: Zoom
Moderator: Felipe Santos
Co-Decision and Responsiveness: the Case of EU Social Policy
Miriam Sorace
LSE, London

The European Union (EU) is often maligned as an undemocratic super-state. To tackle the accusations of a democratic deficit, the EU has continuously empowered its only directly elected institution: the European Parliament (EP). This empowerment culminated with the introduction of the codecision procedure, which has advanced symmetric bicameralism in the EU, making the EP a powerful co-legislator. This study asks whether codecision has also reduced the EU's democratic deficit. In particular, this study examines substantive democratic deficits, by measuring the responsiveness of EU policies to European public opinion. The article leverages text data of 75 directives and regulations in social and employment policy between 1990 and 2008 as well as post-stratification of European public opinion during the same time period. It uses a differences-in-differences approach and crowd-sourced ideological scaling of EU social and employment policies in order to causally identify the impact of the introduction of codecision on the nature of policy responsiveness in the EU.


Reference:
Fr-P3-02
Session:
EU Politics
Presenter/s:
Miriam Sorace
Topic:
EU Politics
Presentation type:
Oral presentation
Room:
Zoom
Date:
Friday, 19 June
Time:
10:15 - 10:30
Session times:
10:00 - 11:30

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