When you see the results of the vote in Committee or Plenary, you are seeing the results of an agreement that was reached over the last two weeks before the vote.
Few votes go to Committee that are not locked in agreement between most of the political groups.
This means if you are not helping mold that compromise two weeks before the formal vote, you have gone AWOL.
Most politicians work on the basis of compromise. They’ve learned that you can get more of what you want by compromising.
Lawmaking is not a zero-sum game. No one party has enough votes to steamroll what they want through. So, they’ll bargain.
And, even if they have the votes, they’ll work for a consensus. They know one day they won’t have a super dtrong majority.
If you have not worked in this world, you’ll find it hard to understand.
This is not the business for purists, obsessives, and ideologues. They exist in the world of all or nothing. Most of the time, they get nothing.
You can tell if agreements have been struck by looking at the vote results. If the main political groups vote together on the report and all the amendments, an agreement has been struck.
Sometimes the difficult issues may only be resolved a few days before the vote.
But the technical meetings between the Group/Political Advisers and the Rapporteurs/Shadows are all part of a process to minimize the differences between Political Groups and reach a common line.
The challenge is that once agreements are reached, they are rarely undone. So, you need to step in early to keep your key ask alive and either reach a consensus agreement early on or keep it alive to a vote in the Committee.
Once the text is agreed by strong majorities in the Committee, it is unlikely that the political settlement will be undone in Plenary.
Your best way to influence the process is in five ways:
First, you need to bring evidence, solutions, and legislative text to the table early on.
Second, you are often best served by finding someone to carry your asks to the politicians whom the politicians trust, rather than you doing it yourself. You need to put your ego to one side and realize all that counts is getting the best outcome possible.
Third, you need to explain your position in terms that non-experts understand. Understand your audience. Don’t bombard them with information that requires a post-doc from MIT to understand.
Fourth, don’t be blinded by your prejudice. On many files I’ve worked on over the years, clients have gotten what they wanted because of the support of a politician who they thought was against them.
Finally, you need to compromise. You can’t get everything you want. If you do, you risk not getting anything. You need to ideally have one main thing you want. Anything else is nice to have. Have that list written down at the start.