Koordinationsausschüsse als parlamentarische Agendasetzer

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The project analyzes coordination committees (CCs) in European parliaments as horizontal collective actors (HCAs). Examples of CCs include the Ältestenrat in the German Bundestag, the Präsidialkonferenz in the Austrian National Council, and the Backbench Business Committee in the UK House of Commons. These non-hierarchical committees typically comprise the president of parliament and additional members such as party group representatives and committee chairs. Their core task is setting the parliamentary agenda. Agenda setting is crucial for understanding legislatures because it shapes parliamentary processes and outputs, influences public debate and electoral competition, and affects the distribution of power between different actors in parliament. Nonetheless, we know very little about how and with what consequences CCs shape the legislative agenda and about why their role differs across parliaments. The project’s first module will map and explain variation in agenda setting regimes, especially in the design of CCs (composition, internal decision rules, and resources) across European parliaments. The second module will explore internal dynamics in selected CCs to assess whether the often highly consensual decisions of CCs can be explained based on their members’ individual preferences or reflect the emergence of an autonomous HCA in the terms of the Research Unit (RU) “Horizontal Collective Actors”. Drawing on rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism and psychological group theory the project develops competing theoretical accounts of how CCs gain resources and whether and why they develop into autonomous actors. These accounts will be tested empirically based on original data collected from legal rules and official documents, a survey of committee staff, and qualitative interviews with committee members and staff. The project will contribute to ongoing debates on the institutional design of legislative agenda setting regimes. Within the RU, CCs constitute a hard case for finding autonomy because their members represent corporate actors (party groups) with often antagonistic preferences leaving, on first sight, little room for group-based behavior that deviates from an aggregation of members’ preferences. Finding autonomy under such conditions would provide strong evidence for the pervasiveness of the phenomenon whereas its absence helps define boundary conditions for the emergence of autonomous HCAs.