The EU Timescape

Klaus Goetz, Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling, Klaus H. Goetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135756192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The manner in which time is institutionalized is critical to how a political system works. Terms, time budgets and time horizons of collective and individual political actors; rights over timing, sequencing and speed in decision-making; and the temporal properties of policy matter to the distribution of power; efficiency and effectiveness of policy-making; and democratic legitimacy. This book makes a case for the systematic study of political time in the European Union (EU) - both as an independent and a dependent variable - and highlights the analytical value-added of a time-centred analysis. The book discusses previous scholarship on the institutionalization of political time and its consequences along the dimensions of polity, politics and policy; reviews dominant perspectives on political time, which centre on power, system performance and legitimacy; and presents case studies that illustrate the importance of time in the governance of the EU.

This book was original published as a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.

Political time in the EU: dimensions, perspectives, theories

Klaus H. Goetz and Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling

ABSTRACT The manner in which time is institutionalized is critical to how a political system works. Terms, time budgets and time horizons of collective and individual political actors; rights over timing, sequencing and speed in decision-making; and the temporal properties of policy matter to the distribution of power; efficiency and effectiveness of policy-making; and democratic legitimacy. This article makes a case for the systematic study of political time in the European Union (EU) – both as an independent and a dependent variable – and highlights the analytical value-added of a time-centred analysis. The article discusses previous scholarship on the institutionalization of political time and its consequences along the dimensions of polity, politics and policy; and then reviews dominant perspectives on political time, which centre on power, system performance and legitimacy. These perspectives tie in with diverse theoretical traditions in the study of the EU. Taken together, dimensions, perspectives and theories help to guide time-centred analyses of the EU political system.

Why Study Political Time? ¹

The Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU) is a permanent institution, but its presidency changes every six months. Members of the European Parliament (EP) are elected for a five-year term, but key posts in the EP – including those of the President, the Vice-President and committee chairs – are reallocated in mid-term. The President of the Commission and the Commissioners are appointed for five years, but most of the staff with whom they work are appointed on a permanent basis. The six members of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) serve non-renewable eight-year terms, but their terms are staggered, i.e. scheduled to end in 2010, May and October 2011, and 2012, 2013 and 2014. The sequence as well as the respective rights and responsibilities of the Commission, the EP and the Council in the legislative process are subject to detailed provisions, but leave great scope for the acceleration of decisions, for instance, in the shape of so-called ‘early agreements’ under the co-decision procedure (see Corbett et al. 2007: 224ff.). Parliament, unlike the Council, is not a permanent institution, but legislation still pending at the end of a legislative term is routinely carried over into the newly elected legislature, so that the ‘discontinuity principle’ applied in most national legislatures is effectively suspended (Kovats 2009). Both the Commission and the Parliament have five-year mandates, but the parameters of the EU budget are determined through the multi-annual financial perspective in a seven-year cycle.

It is our central contention that these and many other temporal features of the EU political system deserve more sustained and systematic study than they have received so far. There is much to be gained from according political time a central place in EU scholarship: if we understand better ‘how the EU ticks’ (Goetz 2009), we will also gain insights into how it distributes opportunities for effective participation in decision-making; why it is good at doing some things – say, creating a single market – but bad at others – say, the promotion of growth and employment (Kok Report 2004); and why some of its procedures are seen as more legitimate than others. Put differently: research into the ‘EU timescape’ (see Meyer-Sahling and Goetz 2009) – both as a ‘dependent’ and an ‘independent’ variable – raises new questions about the EU and it opens up novel perspectives on long-standing debates.

Our main concern is not with historical analysis, in the sense of explaining developments over time, an interest that has featured prominently in EU studies, both in integration theory – most notably in neo-functionalist and historical institutionalist accounts of integration – and also in historical institutionalist policy analysis. As Bulmer’s (2009) discussion in this volume makes clear, however, there are fruitful connections to be made between the study of ‘politics in time’ (Pierson 2004) and an agenda centred on political time and political timescapes. Nor do we focus on the impact of the past on the present – of ‘governing with the past’ – the importance of which Pollitt (2008) has recently emphasized in the context of administrative and policy analysis. Nor do we have much to say on how unforeseen and unforeseeable events, crises and ‘bolts from the blue’ may play havoc with well-laid plans and timetables. Rather, we are interested in the temporal features that are built into the political system of the EU and in how the specific manner in which they are institutionalized matter for power, performance and legitimacy.

By treating time as an institutional property we privilege an interest in temporal rules (broadly understood) and the temporal features of procedures. These can, of course, vary in precision, formality and authority (Stone Sweet et al. 2001: 6–7). We, therefore, share in the mainstream of institutionalist approaches to the study of Europe, which think of institutions as ‘the structure in which social interaction – as opposed to random encounters – takes place; they tend to pattern behaviour in particular ways … institutions make purposive action possible by providing individuals with a framework of shared expectations’ (Stone Sweet et al. 2001: 7). But we argue that the importance of time as an institution has been neglected in EU scholarship.

At the same time, we have to recognize that it is not always easy to determine unambiguously the analytical status of political time within the context of variable-oriented research designs that seek to distinguish clearly between independent, dependent and, possibly, intervening variables. For example, if we were to ask how the time horizon of a Commissioner affects the legislative initiatives that s/he is likely to undertake, we are bound to encounter feedback loops, in the sense that initiatives already undertaken influence future time horizons. Where aspects of time – be they terms, time budgets, time horizons, time rules in decision-making or temporal properties of policy – are used to explain something else, their effects can often only be detected through observation over longer periods of time during which ‘effect may become cause’ (Pierson 2004). Moreover, the effects of such temporal features of a political system can rarely be understood without reference to substance – what is substantively at stake – and also to space (especially important in a multi-level setting). This is why research into the institutionalization of political time and its effects needs to ‘foreground’ time (Adam 2008), but cannot necessarily treat it as a discreet variable.

Bearing in mind these analytical challenges, the success of previous efforts to put political time at the heart of comparative analysis has not been encouraging. As Schedler and Santiso (1998) noted in their ‘invitation’ from the late 1990s to concentrate research on ‘political time’, ‘[t]ime in its manifold manifestations represents a pervasive factor in political life’, but ‘as a rule, reflections on politics and time have remained unsystematic, implicit, and disperse, and our theoretical insights, conceptual tools, and empirical knowledge have remained severely limited’ (Schedler and Santiso 1998: 5). A major German-language monograph on contemporary political time in national democratic settings published by Riescher (1994) has largely failed to inspire further empirical analysis. Similarly, the insightful work by Ekengren (1996, 1997, 2002) on the time of EU governance did not spark a wider discussion on the specific properties of political time in the EU and its consequences for the member states.

It is, perhaps, the ubiquity of political time that has tended to discourage its systematic analysis. For example, Schedler and Santiso’s (1998) attempt to outline a future research agenda encompassed a very wide range of issues related to political time, including politicians’ time horizons, the role of time constraints, the importance of institutional time rules, time strategies and also time discourses. The temporal categories that can be analysed are, in themselves, numerous. Empirical work has addressed issues of temporal location (when does something happen?); sequence (in what order do things happen?); speed (how quickly do things happen?) (Schmitter and Santiso 1998), and also duration (how long do things take?). But there are a host of other temporal features that matter in political life, including, for example, deadlining and punctuality, rates of recurrence, and, in particular, cycles and rhythms (Meyer-Sahling 2007).

Yet much of what we know so far about political time relates to differences between national political regimes (Schedler and Santiso 1998; Riescher 1994). Linz (1998) has reminded us that government pro tempore is a – or perhaps the – defining feature of democracies. Governments in non-democratic regimes do not face a similar constraint. ‘The pro-tempore character of democratic government makes it essential that elections take place with reasonable frequency’ (Linz 1998: 21). The limited time budget resulting from regular elections makes time a ‘scarce resource’ (Linz 1998: 22) in democratic politics and democratic politicians, in particular, a ‘harried elite’ (Linz 1998: 29). Following Linz, this inbuilt restriction of democratic time has a profound impact on the temporal ordering of the activities of governments and parliaments. Their term of office provides political decision-makers with an overall time budget, which they need to allocate wisely if they wish to be re-elected. It also marks their most important time horizon. What to do when, in what sequence, how speedily and for how long are, accordingly, enduring political preoccupations. In short, the electoral term is the most fundamental time unit of democracy and the electoral cycle to which the democratic limitation of time gives rise is its defining temporal feature.

Democracy’s time constraint not only works at the polity level, notably the institutional terms of governments and legislatures. Time also matters at the levels of politics and policy. As regards the former, temporal rules governing political decision-making are of special significance. A good deal of work has, for example, examined how time rules in parliaments – notably as they affect the timing of legislative initiatives – influence the distribution of power both between the executive and parliament and within the legislature (for example Döring 1995, 2003, 2004). As regards the policy dimension, policy timing has been an enduring theme. Here, one thinks immediately of work on political business cycles, which has noted the link between electoral rules and resultant time budgets and time horizons of political decision-makers, on the one hand, and the ‘opportunistic’ timing of economic policy tools, on the other (for a review of much of this work, see Drazen 2001).

The case for analysing political time is supported by the fact that political time is intimately connected to power, system performance and legitimacy. The link between time rules and the allocation of power is probably too apparent to require much comment; but time rules also matter for the efficiency and effectiveness of political decision-making and political legitimacy. To recognize this point it may suffice to remind ourselves briefly of Hamilton’s comments on ‘The Duration in Office of the Executive’ in the Federalist Papers No. 71. The argument in favour of a four-year term for an elected ‘magistrate’ (i.e. chief executive) rests on the likelihood that it will ensure the ‘firmness and independence of the magistrate’:

It cannot be affirmed, that a duration of four years, or any other limited duration, would completely answer the end proposed; but it would contribute towards it in a degree which would have a material influence upon the spirit and character of the government. Between the commencement and termination of such a period, there would always be a considerable interval, in which the prospect of annihilation would be sufficiently remote, not to have an improper effect upon the conduct of a man indued with a tolerable portion of fortitude; and in which he might reasonably promise himself, that there would be time enough before it arrived, to make the community sensible of the propriety of the measures he might incline to pursue … on the one hand, a duration of four years will contribute to the firmness of the Executive in a sufficient degree to render it a very valuable ingredient in the composition; so, on the other, it is not enough to justify any alarm for the public liberty.

In today’s EU setting, very similar considerations are brought to bear when it comes to assessing its temporal features, though the way in which they are expressed is, of course, quite different. Thus, to give just two examples, the increasing duration of law-making is often seen as a sign of inefficient decision-making (König 2007; Kovats 2009), whilst the introduction of an elaborate multi-annual planning cycle in the Commission has been justified on grounds of better governance (Tholoniat 2009). As regards legitimacy, time rules relating to, for example, the rights of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and parliamentary groups in the legislative process are of critical relevance when it comes to assessing claims about the EU’s democratization through parliamentarization. In short, the analysis of political time leads us to the core of contemporary scholarly and political debates about power, performance and legitimacy in the EU (Hix 2008; Menon 2008).

Against this background, this special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy makes the case for a more systematic study of time in the EU. In this introductory article, we first review previous scholarship on the institutionalization of political time and its consequences along the dimensions of polity, politics and policy. For each of the three dimensions, we identify the main properties and provide examples from debates in comparative politics and debates surrounding the EU political system. Second, we discuss dominant perspectives on political time, which centre on power, system performance and legitimacy. These perspectives tie in with different theoretical traditions in the study of the EU, which we discuss in our last section. Taken together, dimensions, perspectives and theories help to identify key questions in time-centred analyses of the EU political system, an issue that is taken up again in the conclusion (Meyer-Sahling and Goetz 2009) to this special issue.

Institutionalizing Political Time: Polity, Politics and Policy

In its substantive emphases, previous scholarship on political time has tended to coincide fairly closely with the widely accepted distinction between polity, politics and policy dimensions in the analysis of political systems. This distinction has also been applied in the study of the EU (e.g., Hix 2005) and in much recent work on the Europeanization of domestic political systems (see, e.g., Goetz and Meyer-Sahling 2008; Graziano and Vink 2007). The three dimensions are concerned, respectively, with term lengths and configurations of political and senior administrative officeholders, their time budgets and time horizons; rights to influence the timing, sequencing, speed and duration of political decision-making processes; and the temporal properties of public policy, such as transposition deadlines or the duration of temporary derogations.

Polity: terms, time budgets, and time horizons

In a democracy, the most fundamental temporal unit is the electoral term, the maximum length of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Political time in the EU: dimensions, perspectives, theories
• 2. How does the EU tick? Five propositions on political time
• 3. The temporal constitution of the European Commission: a timely investigation
• 4. Do elections set the pace? A quantitative assessment of the timing of European legislation
• 5. Uses of time in the EU’s enlargement process
• 6. Policies, institutions and time: how the European Commission managed the temporal challenge of eastern enlargement
• 7. The evolving timescapes of European economic governance: contesting and using time
• 8. Politics in Time meets the politics of time: historical institutionalism and the EU timescape
• 9. The EU timescape: from notion to research agenda
• Index