The discretion of the EP negotiating team in the informal trilogues regarding the 2014-2020 CAP reform: A Principal-Agent Analysis.

The dissertation analyzes the discretion of the European Parliament’s (EP) negotiating team during trilogues, which are rounds of tripartite negotiations between the Council, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. The tool used to analyze the negotiating team's discretion is the Principal-Agent theory. This subject is to be framed in the case study of the 2013 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform. This reform was the first one in which the European Parliament (through the work of its responsible committee, the COMAGRI) was involved as a co-legislator in agricultural matters. This is the reason why, both in the trilogues and the Principal-Agent literatures, the study of COMAGRI as a responsible committee has not yet been deeply analyzed. The present thesis tackles the subject from when the Commission proposal has been amended by the EP in March 2013, up until November 2013, when the EP approved at first reading the resulting regulations. During the trilogue negotiations, the EP negotiating team enjoys some level of discretion, but its extent and the reasons behind this autonomy are still unknown. Therefore, this dissertation’s goal is to investigate and understand them. By doing so, this dissertation tries to answer the following question: how to explain the level of discretion enjoyed by the EP negotiating team in the informal trilogues for the 2014-2020 CAP reform?