Shifting competences and changing preferences: the case of delegation to comitology

The article examines how changes of powers in the inter-institutional balance have affected the willingness of the Commission and the Council to delegate legislative power to comitology committees. Starting from the assumption that actors seek to maximize their institutional power in order to increase their influence over policy outcomes, we argue that changes of institutional rules affect their willingness to adopt legislation through comitology procedures.

We examine the effects of the introduction of the 1999 comitology decision, which increased the competences of the Commission in the comitology procedure by abolishing the ‘double safety net’. We show that the Commission has proposed delegation to management and regulatory committees more extensively since the adoption of this decision. Surprisingly, the Council – which saw its own competences reduced by the decision – did not put up significant resistance to the more frequent use of delegation.