Replication data for: Joint bodies in the European Union's international agreements: Delegating powers to the European Commission in EU external relations

Abstract: In many international agreements, the European Union sets up joint bodies such as ‘association councils’ or ‘joint committees’. These institutions bring together European Union and third-country officials for agreement implementation. To date, we know surprisingly little about how much discretion the European Commission enjoys in them. Drawing on a principal–agent framework, we hypothesise that the complexity of agreements, the voting rule, conflict within the Council, and agency losses can explain Commission discretion in these institutions. Drawing on an original dataset covering nearly 300 such joint bodies set up by the European Union since 1992, we find robust empirical support for all expectations except for the agency loss thesis. Our findings suggest that the European Commission is the primary actor in the implementation of many of the European Union's international agreements, allowing it to influence EU external relations beyond what is currently acknowledged in the literature. The files uploaded entail the material necessary to replicate the results from the article and Online appendix published in: Gastinger, M. and Dür, A. (2021) ‘Joint bodies in the European Union’s international agreements: Delegating powers to the European Commission in EU external relations’, European Union Politics 22(4): 611–630, available at Doi: 10.1177/14651165211027397.The following files are included: EUP_replication_data.csvRaw data necessary to replicate the findings. EUP_replication_data.rdsConvenience upload for R users. EUP_replication_script.RThe R script. online_appendix.pdfAdditional information on our study. sessionInfo.txtVersion information about R, the OS and attached or loaded packages. Please let us know if you spot any mistakes or if we may be of any further assistance!