Much ado about money and how to spend it! Analysing 40 years of annulment cases against the European Union Commission

This article analyses four decades of annulment cases against the European Commission brought before the European Court of Justice by dissatisfied Member States. Annulment cases are interpreted as incidents of a struggle between Member State governments and the Commission about policy decisions. Studying annulment cases for the first time in comparative perspective, three important patterns of variation are identified: with respect to the evolution of annulment cases over time, as regards the Member States as plaintiffs and in view of policy fields. Subsequently the data are interpreted on the basis of structure, agency and policy field specific explanatory mechanisms. Leaving the aggregate level, the two policy areas that account for more than 80 per cent of annulments are analysed: EU agriculture and competition policy. In the vast majority of cases, the dominant rationale behind annulments is not national objections to the supranational exercise of delegated powers per se or in specific policies (as most structural theories would expect) but to the way the Commission uses these competences to restrict how national governments may allocate European or national funding.