The data presented in the previous chapter confirm the key argument of this book: actors engage in everyday politics with respect to rules whenever opportunities and incentives align. They play procedural politics, that is, to the extent that jurisdictional ambiguity makes institutional alternatives available and to the extent that those alternatives differ in the influence they afford the EU Parliament, Commission, Council, or member states. Procedural politics varies systematically and in a theoretically consistent way over time and across actors and issues. It exerts strong and theoretically expected effects on policymaking efficiency and long-run institutional change.

The data in Chapter 4, drawn as they are from a dataset of some forty-seven hundred pieces of EU law, are necessarily general, and the tests used suffice to establish associations but may lack the depth to support the causality underlying them. Do procedural political disputes occur for the reasons identified by the theory? When they do occur, what behavioral dynamics characterize them? How do procedural political disputes affect policy and institutional processes and outcomes in concrete cases? How and to what extent do these processes and outcomes differ from those normally posited by students of EU politics and policymaking, to say nothing of institutions more generally?

This chapter and the next empirically address these important issues using logics of both intra- and intersectoral comparison. This chapter examines procedural politics in EU environmental policymaking. It begins by summarizing the procedural development of EU environmental policy.