Reforming the EU Budget: A Time Series Analysis of Institutional and Partisan Effects

The marginal involvement of the EU in redistributive policies and its limited fiscal resources have led to a lack of attention to the EU budget and its determinants. In this paper I analyse an original dataset containing yearly data on the main macrocategories of expenditure and how they have changed over the last three decades (1984-2013). Using time series analysis, I find that the ability to form winning coalitions in the Council, the ideological position of the co-legislators, and some ‘structuring events’ - like the adoption of the Multiannual Financial Framework and the accession of the cohesion countries - have a significant role in driving the process of budgetary reform.