When (and how) do the commission's preferences matter?

Abstract

Regulatory innovations found in the EC's Integrated Mediterranean Programmes can best be explained by a model informed by the study of publicpolicy and historical institutionalism. In such an approach, preferences of the Member States are potentially endogenous. They can be altered by reasoned arguments presented by Commission experts. Similarly, the Commission's formal agenda-setting power is found to depend more on the short time horizon of chiefs of government than on imperfect or asymmetric information. Both of these findings suggest limits to the general applicability of rational choice inspired principal - agent models of the European Community. * An earlier version of this article was presented to the 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. For extensive and invaluable comments, I am grateful to George Ross, Jon Golub and particularly to Mark Pollack whose title for our panel I have adopted, with slight modification, for this article.