CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Kudrna, Zdenek |
|---|---|
| Title | Delegating contested reforms of the EU financial market regulation |
| Summary | This thesis aims to contribute to an understanding of institutional change within the EU's multilevel system of governance, as applicable to the single market in financial services. The single market requires regulatory integration, understood as the adoption of a single set of harmonized EU rules and their consistent implementation across all EU countries. Regulatory integration is essentially an institutional change from multiple national regulatory frameworks towards a single EU framework. This process is complicated by several obstacles: conflicting policy preferences of member states for important aspects of EU financial regulations, supermajoritarian EU decision-making requirements, as well as member states' control over implementation of EU rules. The EU addresses these complications by delegating regulatory powers to technocratic committees, leading to the question of whether and how this delegation of power enhances regulatory integration. The three strands of new institutionalist literature in political science suggest alternative causal mechanisms that could account for effects of delegation on regulatory integration. The historical institutionalist explanation relies on reinterpretation, and the sociological one is based on deliberation and the rationalist one relies on bargaining. Each of these explanations implies different patterns of policy compromises: hence their relative explanatory power can be empirically tested. The thesis concludes that the evidence from three longitudinal case studies of EU regulations of bank capital, investment services, and cross-border bank resolution is most consistent with the rationalist explanation of institutional change. The delegation of regulatory powers to autonomous, but accountable committees reduces the transaction costs of EU policy making, enabling committees to propose and monitor more complex and more harmonized package deals than was possible before the delegation. Although these committees can enhance regulatory integration of even the most politically contested aspects of EU financial regulations, their effects are limited and provide no substitute for difficult political choices about the most appropriate rules for the single market in financial services. |
| Supervisor | Csaba, Laszlo |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/iphkuz01.pdf |
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