https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6528-4364
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ABSTRACT
We analyse how Euroscepticism affects the bargaining success of governments in European Union (EU) legislative negotiations. We argue that pro-European governments who face Euroscepticism at home are more successful in the EU. Pro-European governments can use the threat of Euroscepticism to bargain for better outcomes in the Council’s informal negotiating environment, with the goal of mitigating electoral losses to Eurosceptic challengers. We test the empirical implications of our theory using the extended DEU data set on legislative negotiations from 1998-2019. The estimations of a multi-level mixed effects regression model provide support for our theory, showing that pro-European governments facing Eurosceptic publics achieve EU policies closer to their preferred outcomes.
Acknowledgements:
We thank Javier Arregui, Mareike Kleine, Robert Thomson, the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We are grateful to Chris Wratil for sharing his code on the ‘CMP Government Positions Data’ with us. The data, code, and appendices that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LLW39E.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 A related literature has focused on bargaining success in EU budget negotiations (Rodden, Citation2002; Aksoy, Citation2010; Schneider, Citation2013).
2 Hobolt and de Vries (Citation2016) offer an excellent summary of this literature.
3 Even though the intensity of EU politicisation varies in response to particular events, it has generally increased over time (Rauh, Citation2016; Hutter et al., Citation2016).
4 Although bargaining success is not responsiveness in the classical sense of delivering policies preferred by citizens, it allows governments to signal responsiveness by taking positions that are popular with the public and dissenting with outcomes that are not in the national interest.
5 Euroscepticism is multi-dimensional and can refer to (i) exit-scepticism, when citizens want their country to leave the EU altogether, (ii) policy-scepticism, when citizens disagree with EU policy outcomes, and (iii) regime-scepticism, when citizens are concerned about technocratic influence and democratic deficiencies (de Vries, Citation2018). According to de Vries (Citation2017, Citation2018), the extent of exit-scepticism is limited in the EU-27.
6 CNBC. July 19, 2020. ‘EU grapples with ‘mission impossible’ at deadlocked summit over coronavirus economic recovery fund.’
7 The Economist. July 11, 2020. ‘A Dutch Dilemma.’
8 Atlantic Council. May 29, 2020. ‘Italian, Spanish diplomats stress EU solidarity in wake of COVID-19 economic response.’
9 Indeed, that countries with extreme positions are less successful on average is one of the most robust findings of the literature.
10 This explains why Eurosceptic governments are less likely to negotiate better outcomes even if they face domestic conflict. Whereas Eurosceptic governments should generally exert more effort to achieve better negotiation outcomes, their positions are typically far away from the average position in the Council.
11 Reuters. July 22, 2020. ‘Italian eurosceptics in difficulty as EU fund deal boosts PM Conte.’
12 The Daily Mail. January 6, 2015. ‘Cameron ditched plan to cap number of EU migrants 48 h before big speech after protests by Germany’s Angela Merkel.’
13 We present a descriptive graph and address three potential criticisms of our operationalisation in Online Appendix A.
14 It would be interesting to analyse whether degrees of conflict might matter. Unfortunately, it is difficult to do so in a meaningful way because the two sources of data are measured on different scales. Whereas they help us measure whether populations and governments are, on average, more pro-European or Eurosceptic, they do not let us analyse how much more pro-European the government is compared to its population.
15 These cut-points are likely more fluent and context-dependent. In addition, pro- European governments could increase their appeal to other governments if they had credible expectations that success will avert a shift toward Euroscepticism. While it is difficult to measure these fine-grained variations, in Online Appendix D we show that the results are robust to moving these cut points. We also estimate models that include EU Support [Public] and EU Support [Government] separately. We expect that EU Support [Public] decreases Bargaining Success, but that this relationship is mainly driven by the effect of pro-European governments facing Euroscepticism as measured by Conflict.
16 In Online Appendix C, we show that the extent of Euroscepticism does not have an influence on the bargaining success of pro-European governments.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nathan Mariano
Nathan Mariano is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on firm and consumer behavior in the realm of environmental politics and the domestic politics of international environmental organizations.
Christina J. Schneider
Christina J. Schneider is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on the domestic politics of international cooperation, international bargaining, and democratic representation in international organizations with a focus on the European Union, regional organizations, and international development organizations.