Domination by the principal

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deciding power is in the hands of its members, namely the representatives of the Member States and the industry.

Based on the above analysis, it can be concluded that the procedural requirements written in the final text of the directive were not minimal but rather extensive, and that the choice of mentioned instruments were, instead of being broad, very narrow. This confirms my statement, according to which the Council wanted to control the Commission extensively, and also answers my fourth hypothesis about the Member States’ intentions and ability to control the Commission.

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situation and, hence, only very little commitment was assessed to be necessary. Due to the Commission’s opposite assessment, the institutions ended up in a conflict situation. This enforced the Council’s conclusion, and as a result, the Commission’s level of discretion was significantly reduced.

The third of my hypotheses holds on the part of the Commission but not on the part of the Parliament. The Commission clearly operated to actualise its pro-integrationist and competence- maximising preferences. The Parliament, on the other hand, did the opposite by sharing views with the Council. The Parliament did not only promote less competence for the Commission, but also for itself when it approved the change of the legal base. Finally, on the part of the directive, the analysis of my fourth hypothesis confirms my earlier notion according to which the Member States felt the need to, and were able to, use extensive administrative procedures to control the Commission. This concerns also the Parliament as it lost all of its legal competence on the matter when the legal base of the directive was changed.

At this point it should be noted that even though Pollack uses his theory and hypotheses mainly to examine the executive politics of the EU, namely delegation via EC Treaties, I incorporate the same hypotheses to the analysis of delegation via secondary legislation. Franchino (2007, 14) writes about the process of legislative delegation as follows:

EU legislators (ministers of the Council and, where involved, members of the Parliament – MEPs) confer upon bureaucrats via secondary legislation according to the EU legislative procedures. The beneficiaries are the Commission, other EU-level agencies and national administrations. Control mechanisms are also set up in these circumstances to ensure faithful implementation.

To perceive the object of my analysis this way creates, however, a problem. In Franchino’s description the Parliament is conceived more as a principal than an agent as it is a legislator who determines, in part, how much delegation the Commission or national administrations will gain through each adopted legal act. However, Franchino acknowledges that the Parliament is not always involved in the legislative process with the same level of legal competence and, hence, its influence on different legal acts varies. For this reason it is justified to treat the Parliament as an agent alongside the Commission, and give the Council and its Member States the role of a principle. This is not to say that the Parliament is an agent similar to the Commission. The two are different and this should be remembered when analysing their functioning.

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I mentioned that normally the involvement of the Parliament centralises power to the EC. However, the discretion preferences of the Parliament are shaped by the conditions of the situation and, therefore, this time the conflicting views between the Parliament and the Commission resulted in the Parliament’s tightening of the Commission’s procedural requirements. However, this is not a sufficient reasoning for the Parliament’s behaviour. To find out what really happened I would need more extensive material and perhaps conduct interviews with the rapporteur Mombaur or certain MEPs. Therefore, I can only speculate about the possible reasons for the Parliament’s “unusual”

behaviour. One possible explanation is that the national governments lobbied the MEPs to vote according to the national interest of each Member State, which was, as mentioned, to limit the delegation of competence to the EC level. As shown for example by Hix and Høyland (2011, 57) the national party delegations remain powerful within the European political groups. Also, as national parties control the selection of candidates in the elections, MEPs almost always vote with their national party (Hix, 2004, 219). Therefore, it is possible that the MEPs were affected by their national lobbyers. Furthermore, Varela (2009, 28) points out that the Parliament is an important channel for other lobbyists to access the decision-making process as well. Therefore, also Eurogas and other interests groups could have influenced the issue. The same applies to the rapporteur.

Benedetto (2005, 85-86) argues that in order to get their reports adopted, the rapporteur has to closely consider the interests of the European and national parties, suggestions from lobbyist, and opinions of other committee members. This might have also played a part in rapporteur Mombaur’s choice of action.

On part of the legal act debate, I illustrated that the Parliament’s influence was reduced to a minimum because many Member States have specific national sensitivities concerning security of gas supply and, hence, the costs of involving the Parliament fully into the legislation process were considered higher than the benefits of the “logic of appropriateness”. In fact, national sensitivities were one of the main reasons why the level of delegation was so low in the final legislative act of the directive. The Member States had significant differences in their national energy supply conditions and thus the cost of negotiating new agreements on the EC level would have been higher than relying on the existing intergovernmental contracts. As a result none of the multiple principals was willing to give up its competence. The interest groups contributed to this result by arguing that the status quo, i.e. trusting the market to secure gas supply, was the most effective way to proceed.

In this case the short-term policy goals of the Member States, such as the maintenance of least costly supply for their domestic consumers, was preferred over possible long-term goals, such as the

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containment of an influential import country from controlling the EU energy markets. All in all, it can be concluded that the Council was clearly the dominating actor in the decision-making process of the directive concerning security of gas supply. Even though it delegated some functions to the Commission, it also exercised extensive control mechanisms over it and the Parliament, and therefore, dictated the result of the decision-making process mainly on its own. Now, I will turn to the decision-making process of the regulation.