Explaining negotiations in the conciliation committee

The conciliation committee is the ultimate inter-cameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary (former codecision) legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? Are the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on an equal footing? We argue that the institutional set-up of the committee is bias in favour of the Council. We offer evidence in support of this proposition by estimating, through Wordfish, the similarity between the documents of almost all the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. This evidence suggests that, in almost seventy percent of times, the final agreement is more similar to the position of the Council. As expected, the Parliament has been more successful after the reform of the Treaty of Amsterdam and in dossiers where the Council decides by qualified majority voting. The Parliament also benefits if the rapporteur comes from a large party because a veto threat is more easily executable. In line with König et al. (2007), the support from the Commission is crucial to parliamentary success. Moreover, when national administrations are more involved in implementation than the Commission, parliamentarians are less accommodating than ministers because they value much more legislative design as control mechanism. Weaker or no support is found for other factors.