To Politicise or De-Politicise EU Decision-Making: The Role of Inter-Institutional Agreements

Institutional agreements are one of the key tools in the process of informal constitutionalisation of the European Union. They focus on issues that have been unaddressed or only incompletely addressed in the text of the Treaties and are now legally embedded in article 295 of the Lisbon Treaty. They constitute a legal instrument that rests somewhere in between a legal act and a political declaration. They are (generally) legally binding and rest on the underlying idea of loyal cooperation between the key EU institutional actors. Legal analyses emphasize the resemblances between interinstitutional agreements and constitutional conventions, indicating that in time these legal instruments contributed to the consolidation of power of the European Parliament while restricting the Council’s freedom of action. A key question remains however on whether this legal instrument contributes to enhancing the politicization of issues and EU decision-making by increasing the political stake and public visibility, or whether the inter-institutional agreements contribute to de-politicizing EU decision-making by shifting the weight from institutional conflict to inter-institutional negotiations that facilitate compromise solutions and consensus building. The study addresses this gap in the literature and elaborates a theoretical framework that specifies two competing scenarios under which inter-institutional agreements may contribute to both politicizing and de-politicizing EU decision-making. The theoretical expectations are tested on an original dataset containing information about the content and file characteristics of 240 inter-institutional agreements adopted during 1958-2017 time period.