Over the last ten years, the study of delegation in the EU has increasingly become a favored ground of scholarly examination. Meanwhile, warnings against centralization of powers and excessive bureaucratization in the EU are recurrent in many political circles across Europe. But our current understanding of these processes is both partial and biased. The most comprehensive analyses concentrate predominately on delegation to supranational institutions via the adoption of amendments to the Treaty establishing the EU (Moravcsik, 1998; Pollack, 2003b). However, as clearly illustrated in Chapter 3, delegation decisions abound not only in secondary legislation, EU legislators also extensively rely on national administrations for policy implementation. Hence, a series of questions arises. When are actors likely to prefer the national path of implementation? When are they likely to prefer the supranational one? Some secondary laws may require only a qualified majority in the Council, hence another crucial question, that is almost ignored in current studies, has to be considered: how do decision rules, mediating with policy complexity and with the preferences of member states and of the Commission, shape the choice of implementation path and the degree of discretionary authority conferred upon administrators?

Moravcsik (1998) and Pollack (2003b) emphasize the need to achieve policy credibility as the key rationale for delegating powers to supranational institutions. This view however neglects a strategic dynamics that is likely to occur in secondary legislation.