Europeanization and the inclusive strategies of executive actors

Abstract

In Europeanized policy domains, executive actors are considered especially powerful because they are directly responsible for international negotiations. However, in order to avoid failing in the ratification process, they are also highly dependent on the support of domestic, non-state actors. We argue that in Europeanized decision-making processes, state actors are not passively lobbied, but actively seek collaboration with – and support from – domestic actors. We apply stochastic actor-based modelling for network dynamics to collaboration data on two successive bilateral agreements on the free movement of persons between Switzerland and the European Union (EU). Results confirm our hypotheses that state actors are not passively lobbied, but actively look for collaboration with other actors, and especially with potential veto players and euro-sceptical actors from both the conservative Right and the Left.

Keywords:

• Collaboration network
• Europeanization
• inclusive strategies
• state executives
• stochastic actor-oriented modelling

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank Sandrine Bossy, Alex Fischer, David Keller, Guenda Malinverni, Sarah Nicolet and Denise Traber who contributed to the data gathering. This article is part of a wider research project sponsored by the Swiss Science Foundation (Grant No. 100012-113964). Thanks for their helpful comments also go to Marie-Christine Fontana, Johan Koskinen, Dirk Lehmkuhl, Frédéric Varone and to the editor and two anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Notes

Whether or not collaboration ultimately leads to a compromise is another issue, which is not relevant for the sort of ‘neutral’ collaboration we are investigating in this study.

This does not mean that state actors are more powerful than the most important domestic, non-state actors, but merely that state actors are more powerful in Europeanized processes than in domestic processes. As Table 2 shows, state actors are not more powerful than other types of actors in the case under study.

Formal consultation mechanisms are official stages of the decision-making process and grant access to either selected actors (in so-called working groups or experts' commissions) or to all interested actors (in a consultation procedure). Informal consultation mechanisms consist of unofficial, ad-hoc or personal contact between representatives of the state administration and stakeholders.

Taken together, left-wing and conservative right-wing parties hold a majority of seats in the National Council, the lower chamber of the Swiss parliament. By collecting 50,000 signatures in 100 days, any group can oppose a legislative act voted on by the Swiss parliament and call for a popular vote, which is then decisive. The optional referendum applies to important international treaties, such as the bilateral treaties with the EU.

The consultation procedure is an important venue in Swiss decision-making processes, as it allows every interested actor to express its opinion on the project before it is sent to parliament. However, because the consultation procedure is open to every interested actor, some very unimportant actors also participate in this venue. We therefore decided to focus our interviews on actors that participated in at least one other venue of the decision-making process in addition to the consultation procedure. Results regarding reputational power confirmed that we did interview the most important actors.

The group of state actors includes all administrative agencies responsible for foreign and migration policy. Note that we did not code the Federal Office of Justice as belonging to the group of state actors, since this office did not play a political role during the decision-making process; it was only asked to control judicial aspects of the agreement.

This is a common assumption on which statistical models for non-network data are usually based.

Note that the actor type homophily effect includes a state actor homophily effect. This is important as it ensures that the ‘state outgoing’ and ‘state incoming’ effects are not influenced by collaboration ties among state actors.

Results can be accepted if the t-ratios for model convergence are less than 0.1, which is the case for all models. Further, the Jaccard index, which expresses the amount of change between two waves, should preferably be higher than 0.3 (Snijders et al. 2010: 49), which is the case here (0.52).

The rate parameter ρ in the first row represents the expected average number of opportunities for relational changes per actor from t_x to t_x+1.

The exact links cannot be grasped from Table 2, but only from the original matrices.

This pattern is less clearly observable from the simple descriptive statistics in Table 2, which do not control for other effects.

Additional tests not reported here show that Centre-Right parties and employers' associations have no tendency to attempt to collaborate with the conservative Right.

Additional information

Biographical notes:

Manuel Fischer is a post-doctoral researcher in Political Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).

Pascal Sciarini is a Professor for Swiss and Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.