At the time of the Maastricht Treaty it was decided to review the institutional structures of the European Union at a further intergovernmental conference (ICC), to be held in 1996. In order to sift the options for change and establish an agenda for the conference it was later agreed that a reflection group' would be convened in June 1995. This would be made up of ministers from the 15 member states, one Commissioner and two representatives of the European Parliament. The EP, for its part, assigned its Institutional Affairs Committee (IAC) the task of preparing a report that would form the Parliament's negotiating position. As with all resolutions of the Parliament, this would be debated over several months in Committee, filtered through a week of party group and national party meetings in Brussels, and, then, put to a vote of the whole Parliament at Strasbourg.
By studying the debates in Committee and plenary, and the contents of the amendments at the two stages, it is possible to reconstruct the structure and distribution of political preferences, and to make some estimates of which positions were intensely held and by whom. It is, for a start, evident that the Parliament was engaged in a mult-dimensional political choice and that it is impossible to array preferences on less than four scales without seriously mischaracterizing the nature of the decision that the EP was being called upon to make. These four scales were supranationalism versus intergoverumentalism; 'military versus civilian' foreign policy; small versus large state representation; and left versus right. (Although there were, additionally, important arguments about alternative strategies for the democratization of the Union, these can be largely reduced to the first scale of supranational (strengthening of the European Parliament and refinement of a concept of EU citizenship) versus intergovernmental (enhancing the role of national parliaments)). It is next possible to estimate the distribution of preferences along these scales: survey data of the attitudes of the component national parties that make up the party groups would suggest that both the supranational vs intergovernmental and left-right scales are normally distributed: positions taken in EP debates - and other contexts in which political parties exchange their views on EU development - would imply that the military-civilian scale is also a bell-shaped curve, with preferences clustering towards the middle, but, perhaps, with larger outlying positions than in the case of the former two scales. By contrast, the distribution of preferences on small versus large State rights can be estimated as a flat line from the number of MEPs coming from the two categories of country in the present Parliament. It is finally possible to place clusters of intense preferences in some order along our four scales, as MEPs were themselves very eager in debate to show how their positions related to one another. All of this data - the scales, the distributions, and the location of intense preferences can be brought together in Figure 2.
The political stakes involved in influencing the report were considerable as the IGC would be concerned with principles and decision-making mechanisms defining of the EU's political system. Its decisions would affect the rules for the future exercize of power in the EU, and thus systematically influence subsequent distributions of political values. They would also determine the character of the Union, as intergovernmental or supranational, left or right, democratic or undemocratic, green or dirty, military or civilian, big state dominated or small state friendly. Moreover, the Maastricht model suggested that the Parliament could not be represented at the IG itself, so, for many of its members, the reflection group would provide the only opportnity for direct influence over options for institutional change. The history of agenda formation in the EU, also suggested that anything that was not raised for discussion by the reflection group was unlikely to be considered by the ICC, and, in addition, that there was a kind of 'early mover advantage' in the problematizing of particular issues: those who get in early with credible analyses and solutions tend to have a disproportionate influence on how issues are subsequently debated and bargained.
With high political stakes, there was some evidence of the dominant majority of the Parliament - the Party of European Socialists (PES) and European Peoples Party (EPP) - attempting to 'close' around a winner takes all package that would only leave others satisfied to the extent that solutions were also acceptable to those two main groups. Both the opportunity to draft the report and to represent the Parliament on the reflection group were monopolized by the PES and EPP, with co-responsibility for the first being assigned to David Martin (PES) and Jean-Louis Bourlanges (EPP) and seats on the second going to Elinar Brok (EPP) and Elisabeth Ouigou (PES).
In addition, the smaller groups complained that the larger groups arrogated the process of parliamentary consensus-building; monopolizing for argurments between themselves most of the nine months available to the EP to search for a common position, only to insist that the rest of the Parliament should unite to hurry Martin-Bourlanges through, the moment the PES and EPP finally reached agreement. Some objected that the political choices and preferences of MEPs were not being considered as equal in value, that MEPs from small groups were being treated is if they had little right to a view, and that the large groups were guilty of the cynical manipulation of deadlines: of deliberately leaving things late and then threatening the rest of the Parliament with the humiliation of not being ready with a negotiating position for the opening of the reflection group at the begimaing of June, in order to ensure that only the PES/EPP agenda could be realistically considered. A sense of political exclusion and injustice was underlined by the fact that many of the national political parties in the PES and EPP would, as parties of government have access to the IGC through the European Council, while for many of those in the smaller groups, the European Parliament represented their only chance to influence change.The smaller groups duly responded with protests against majoritarian decision-making and contributed to the tabling of a remarkable 657 amendments to the report in order to register their discontent.
Nonetheless, the PES and EPP represented a combined seat share of 63 per cent of the Parliament. What was to some a minimum winning coalition - in the sense that this was the only combination of just two parties that could win a majority on its own - was to others an oversized majority in its own right, almost equal to a two-thirds vote that would be sufficient to agree constitutional change in many other political systems. But of greater importance was evidencee of a genuine application of Sartori-like methods of consensus- building. For a start, Martin-Bourlanges showed signs of being based on a systematic trawl of political preferences that went well beyond the internal politics of the PES and EPP. During the six months between September 1994 and March 1995, a total of nineteen sub-reports were commissioned of individual members of the IAC from all nine different political groups. Indeed, these were parcelled out between the groups in a manner designed to correspond to known differences in the intensity of their political preferences. For instance, the Danish MEP, Jens-Peter Bonde from Europe des Nations (EDN) got to write recommendations for improving transparency. In addition, all the other committees of the Parliament appomted their own rapporteurs to follow Martin-Bourlanges. The Economic and Monetary Affairs Commitee, for example, prepared two reports of its own; the Social Affairs Committee demanded meetings right up to the last moment to tighten the text. The final paragraphs on reform of the Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy were based on an amendment agreed with the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Enrique Baron Crespo, and not on the original text of Martin-Bourlanges.
When the report came to be voted in the committee, the larger groups also retreated from majoritarian devices, such as proposals to take indicative votes on key principles and then group the amendments to be voted injust a handlul of blocks. By contrast to the practice in some other parliamentary committee systems all 657 amendments were put to a vote unless withdrawn by their proposer, or voided by the prior agreement of a compromise or contradictory measure. Moreover, at the insistence of the Green MEP, Maria Aglietta, there was a strict application of the rule that amendments should be presented in a descending order from which they deviate from the original text. This was of fundamental importance - and a heartening example of political science improving political practice - for, it avoided majoritarian manipulation of the cycling.
Nor was there anything monolithic about the debate within the PES and EPP, either on the substance of the report or on the tactics that should be adopted towards the other groups. In fact, Martin and Bourlanges chose to allow the Committee as a whole to decide between their own positions on around ten key principles of institutional reform, rather than present it with a single set of options.What was highly significant about this choice was that the 'Martin list' was broadly preferred to the 'Bourlanges list' precisely because it allowed more scope for a coneensual, rather than a majoritarian approach to decision-making: for obtaining the largest possible majority of the Parliament, rather than a minimum winning coalition. By the time of the vote in plenary on 17 May 1995, Bourlanges felt that his own approach had been so diluted as to merit the extraordinary step of placing a statement on the parliamentary record that he had only voted for the report of which he was co-author 'apres beaucoup des hesitations et en etant tres faiblement convaincu par son contenu ce rapport contient un certain nombre d'inexactitudes, d'absurdite's et de contradictions'.
The overall picture, therefore, is one of the PES and EPP oscillating between majoritarian and consensual behaviour before finally setling on the former for two very good reasons. First, the Union and the Parliament both have an elaborate code of informal rules requiring bona fide attempts to reach decisions by oversized majorities, and by majorities that are more oversized the more important the decision. And the only way in which the PES and EPP could gain exemption from this norm was to try to reach a wider consensus and to fail on account of other groups. Second, there was a perception that a consensual approach would, in fact, be in the interest of the majority. The Parliament was haunted by the near failure of the ratification of the Maatricht Treaty and the crisis of confidence that this had engendered in European integration. A new Treaty would have to be ratified by 15 countries and not by 12, and at least 6 were expected to hold referenda, where only 3 had done so in the case of Maastricht. In line with recent academic analysis that politicians systematically overestimate the probability of domestic ratification of international bargains on account of substantial time lags in the evolution of public opimon between the opening and conclusion of negotiations, the EP felt that the best way to avoid the pitfalls of Maastricht would be to ensure that options for the new IGC should be developed in consultation with the main leaders of domestic public opinion: the national political parties - and all of the mainstream national political parties, not just those that were included in the Governments of the 15 and thus represented on the European Council. History had shown that the best chance of obtaining yes votes in referenda was to secure the endorsements of the most trusted domestic party leaderships, and often the support of an opposition party would be more useful than that of a jaded and unpopular party of government. In other words, it was in the interests of the dominant groups of the Parliament to give full rein to the EP's unique characteristic as a forum for gaining the inputs of the pre-existing party elites of Western Europe.
So, if a conensual approach of up-grading the common -interest was applied to Martin-Bourlanges, how did it work in terms of our earlier distinction between adding and trading preferences to enlarge majorities? The following attempts were made - either in the original draft of the report, or in the efforts of the rapporteurs to synthesize some of amendments into compromise solutions at the committee stage, or in last-minute changes accepted just before the plenary vote - to satisfy other points of view without violating dominant preferences within the PES or EPP. Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) would be strengthened by allowing joint 'humanitarian, diplomatic or military actions' to be decided by majority vote of the Council. But efforts were made to make this acceptable to MEPs from both neutral and non-neutral countries by adding the words that 'no country should be forced to take part in a common action where it does not wish to do so, nor should it be able to prevent the majority from taking such action'. Attempts were also made to sugar the pill for those who feared the proposed changes to CFSP would take the Union away from a model of civilian power by making consultation of the European Parliament on joint actions obligatory. A bid was made to garner more support from the small groups of the left by calling for a 'more balanced' Economic and Monetary Union, presumably with more scope to consider social and employment implications. Although there could be no unravelling of the Maastricht criteria, it was suggested that there was nothing to stop the 1996 IGC from adding new Treaty provisions to stiffen member states obligations in the areas of 'economic coordination' and 'multilateral surveillance'. One compromise amendment required that the 'attainment of an optimum level of employment should be an explicit goal of the Member states' and that existing provisions for Monetary Union should be more explicitly related to Article 2 of the Treaty with its commitrrent to 'economic and social cohesion'. Throughout the process, strenuous efforts were made to maximize Liberal (ELDR) support for the report, mainly by giving a great deal of attention to the possibility of using the IGC to firm up the notion of EU citizenship and give it a clearer place in a revised Treaty, and in the explanations of vote, the ELDR leader, confirmed that it was, indeed, the acceptance of several Liberal amendments that had inclined the majority of his group to support the final report. Attempts were also made - as far as it was possible - to square the perennial intergovernmentaL/supranational circle. This was evident in the new provision for joint CFSP actions, as already noted, but also in the preference that was shown for the Martin over the Bourlanges approach. The latter sought to end the pillarization of the Union by creating poweful Commission Vice-Presidencies to run the second and third pillars, to make explicit provision for a supranational core of fast-track members to develop within the institutions and to allow member states to withdraw if they were unable to take the pace. Martin, by contrast, preferred to tread more careflilly, preserving, for example, the right of states to nominate individual Commissioners and anticipating the use of reinforced majority voting in matters of 'particular senstitivity'.
As indicated above, the final decision on Martin-Bourlanges proceeded through two stages: the first, a late-night sitting of the Institutional Affairs Committee on 4-5 May 1995 to consider 657 amendments and vote on an overall text to send to the plenary of the Parliament; the second, a vote of the whole Parliament on 17 May 1995 at which a further 190 amendments were tabled. The author managed to attend the Committee session and record the totals for the 290 or so votes that were taken there. In addition, 69 of the votes in the Plenary were by roll-call, so records exist of the positions of individual MEPs,as well as those of their groups.
In combination these two phases thus provide us with a remarkably rich data-set with which to test our key question of whether the EP took an approach akin to Satori's decision-making model of democracy and, if so,with what success? Table 1 is a simple snapshot of the final vote. Table 2 analyses six kinds of majority that were registered during the political process: those on the whole package that emerged from the committee and the plenary; those for amendments carried at the two stages; and those for amendments defeated at the two stages. Table 3 shows how often the different party groups were a part of winning majorities of the Parliament. Table 4 measures what we might call the non-majorities - the average support that were given to counter-suggestions to Martin-Bourlanges, analyzed according to the party groups proposing alternative solutions at the committee stage. Table 5 reproduces the structure of alignments between the different party groups in the Parliament by scoring the number of times the largest cohort of any two groups voted the same way in the 69 plenary votes. Table 6 assesses the cohesion of each group on Martin-Bourlanges by calculating indices of agreement, or frequencies with which MEPs from the same group voted together.
These tables are, in turn, designed as indicators to help us with four kinds of question. How far were majorities oversized? How far were majorities closed with the same people tending to win on all issues, and how far were they fluid? What were the 'policy distances' between majorities and minorities? How far was the final majority maximizing in the sense that it would have been hard to adjust it in any direction without losing more votes that were likely to be gained? The second and fourth questions are simple tests of whether pay-offs followed a 'winner takes all' or a distributive pattern, and the first of how they deviated from a minimum winning coalition with benefits concentrated in the narrowest possible group. The third question alerts us to the fact that there is a continuum of political exclusion, running from those minorities who might find majority positions relatively benign to those who feel that their core values have been systematically violated.
Table 2 shows that the majorities were massively oversized at most stages of the decision, but only moderately soin the final plenary vote on Martin-Bourlanges. On the fluidity of majorities, Table 1 shows that the final majority included the Radicals (ARE) and ELDR, as well as the bulk of the EPP and PSE, while two other groups - Forza and the Greens - mainly abstained. Conversely, Table 5 shows the EPP and PSE losing some of their own support in the final vote, indicating that they may have been prepared to trade some of their own votes for outside support. Tables 2-5 all indicate that the smaller groups frequently participated in winning majorities on subsidiary votes on particular clauses or amendments; the ELDR and ARE did so more than 80 per cent of the time, and two others, the far left (GUE) and the Greens (V), did so more than two thirds of the time. Although the PES and EPP clearly did vote together for much of the time, and more frequently than any other group, it is hard to sustain the view that they constituted a closed or exclusive duopoly. The ELDR and ARE clearly found their proposals to be largely satisfactory, for they voted with the PES and EPP almost as often as the 'big two' managed to vote the same way. Indeed, the Liberals, and the handful of Greens who were won over to the report, stated that they could scarcely withold their own agreement to Martin-Bourlanges - under the Parliament's own informal rules for consensus-building - once the main groups had made sufficient concessions to the preferences of others.
A case can also be made that the final bargain was 'majority maximizing'. Although some 40 per cent of the Parliament had some particular objection of Martin-Bourlanges, the opposition was, in fact, diffuse and contradictory. Formally put, it represented the eight conflicting outlying positions of the four policy dimensions identified above. At both committee and plenary levels the average support for counter suggestions was between only 11 and 15 per cent with between 80 and 85 per cent of the Parliament preferring the solutions offered by Martin-Bourlanges. Typically, each of the smaller seven groups could only get one or two other groups to support their amendments and three - the EDN, Forza (FE) and Gaullists (RDE) - won over less than 10 per cent of their colleagues at the committee stage. Most concrete counter-suggestions to Martin-Bourlanges thus represented the preoccupations of very small pockets of MEPs.
This all suggests that it would have been very hard to have further adjusted the final bargain in any direction without losing more votes than could have been gained - an impression that is conf'irmed by what we know about the distribution of intense preferences GUE might have been won over by a further shift -along the left-right dimension to include some 'real' or 'social' conversion criteria as formal preconditions for the start of stage three of a Monetary Union, but this conflicted with the intense preferences of a far more numerous group to regard the existing criteria as sacrosanct, or even, perhaps in the case of the German Christian Democrats, to strengthen them in the direction of monetary rigour A further shift towards intergovernmentalism might have made things easier for British MEPs of both parties, but only at the expense of a group spanning the EPP, PES and ELDR that seems to have regarded the report as operating at the limits of reasonable concessions of supranationalist preferences. Likewise, the votes of those Greens who felt unable to support a report that seemed to depart from a civilian model of Foreign Policy could only have been secured by upsetting the core coalition in the centre of the Parliament, most of whose members were eager that the Union should develop its capacity to act externally and enhance its ability to assume international responsibilities.
The Martin-Bourlanges report does suggest that our understanding of conensus-building in a transnational parliament like the EP can be improved by Sartori's observations. However, two difficulties remain, and it is worth considering these, perhaps as a prelude to refinement of the original paradigm in further empirical and theoretical research. First, there will be structural limits to which any representative system - whether committee or assembly based - can accommodlate the preferences of all pre-existing elites in a new democratic process. The existence of political indivisibilities - problems that simply cannot be fudged or split down the middle - will not necessarily be a barrier to political compromise. Sartori rightly points out that differences in the saliency of preferences - the intensity with which they are held - can allow political trades to be constructed around indivisibilities: one group is allowed to win on something that it really cares about by conceding a point that another really cares about, and so on. However, the distribution of intense preferences will be crucial: where more than one group has an intense preference on the same policy dimension and this concerns some political indivisibility, a majority-maximizing strategy will demand that only the position closest to the parliamentary average should be included in the consensus-building package. Thus in an example like Martin-Bourlanges it would be impossible to let up on demands that Britain should end its opt-out without alienating more Labour Party members (62) than Conservatives (18); on the continued application of the convergence criteria for monetary union without upsetting more German MEPs (89) than GUE MEPs (31) and soon.
A second difficulty is suggested by the precipitous decline in support for Martin-Bourlanges between the committee and plenary stages. A sense that justice had been done - and every effort made to maximize majorities or accommodate variations in intensity of preferences made - would seem to have been reflected in the final committee vote. For the vast majority on 4 May 1995, the solution reached was satisfactory, even if it was not optimal: it was better than having no agreement, or no change to the existing structures of the Union. And yet, in spite of another round of amendments and accommodations, and the filtering of Martin Bourlanges through a whole week of intense bargaining within and between the party groups, the majority for the report actually fell between the two stages: from 78 per cent of members at the end of the committee vote to 62 per cent of members in the final plenary vote. At one level, the defence of a Sartori decision-making model is obvious: the decline in support simply proves the point that is being made that the sociology of face-to-face bargaining in small groups is inherently more consensual than that of adversarial decision-making in an open, large-scale Assembly. But a difficulty remains and it is that however much decisions may be made more consensual by exhaustive prior preparation in committees, they must eventually emerge into the light of day to be voted on in a public place. This changes the whole matrix of political rewards and sanctions: political actors will no longer be just concerned with how far the final deal does, in fact, correspond to their substantive preferences, but whether they are perceived as the winners and losers by outside groups, whose political support is important. This may have various implications. For instance, movement towards consensus through the complexification of the substance of the bargain by a committee style process may be undone by its subsequent simplification in public discourse or more distant political arenas. In addition, a degree of political free-riding will be possible: once it is clear that a majority is likely to form in the EP, several parties might find it attractive to abstain or dissent with an eye to their competitive position in other political arenas, even though they broadly consider the agreement brokered at the EP level to be better than no agreement at all. The EU may be especially exposed to such problems because it links political arenas - the domestic and the transnational - but in an imperfect fashion, in that flows of information and understanding between the two leave a lot to be desired; because it is often party political competition in the national arena that politicians care most about; and because such competition may proceed according to conflicting rules and logics. It may, for example, be highly significant that British MEPs - both Conservative and Labour - made up 52 out of the 76 who abstained on Martin-Bourlanges. At 11per cent of the total vote, this represented a significant part of the drop in support between the committee and the plenary stages. In the end, the adversarial pattern of politics in one member state was a limiting factor on the application of consensual politics in a European forum, as Labour, in particular, wanted to protect its flank in the domestic arena.
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