Government Positions on the EU Services Directive in the Council: National Interests or Individual Ideological Preferences?

Abstract

What determines a government's position inside the Council of the European Union? This article takes up recent arguments according to which Council decision-making is driven not only by ‘objective’ national interests but also by the ideological preferences of the member states' representatives. On the basis of a study of Germany, Austria and Sweden and their positions with regard to the Services Directive, it seeks to advance the debate by specifying the conditions under which ideological preferences are more likely to dominate. Applying a principal–agent model it is argued that the relative impact of ideological preferences crucially depends on the relationship between the ministers sitting in the Council and the governing parties at the national level: the less a minister is exposed to parliamentary and intra-governmental control, the more a country's position is susceptible to the ideological preferences of the minister.

Acknowledgements

Research was conducted at and financed through the Institute of Advanced Studies Vienna. Work on this article was undertaken in the framework of RECON (Reconstituting Democracy in Europe), an Integrated Project supported by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme (contract no. CIT4-CT-2006-028698). I thank Ben Crum, Oliver Treib, and two anonymous referees for a number of helpful comments.

Notes

1. From a constructivist view, of course, such institutional ‘constraints’ may not only affect an actor's real position, but may also feed back into their preferences (see e.g. Lewis 2006).

2. Interviews were conducted with the assurance of the anonymity of the interviewee. References therefore follow the system ‘Interview number: Line in transcript’ (e.g. Int99:356). The full transcripts are available through the author.

3. For Schröder's full speech see: http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/allemand/ansprachen_und_dokumente/2005/pressekonferenz_mit_staatsprasidenten_chirac_und_bundeskanzler_schroder_ in_blomberg.33201.html (last accessed 6 February 2009).

4. In April 2005 the majority of FPÖ delegates (including all government representatives) left their party and joined the newly founded BZÖ. However, within the Nationalrat, the parties still acted as a uniform parliamentary party.

5. In Sweden fire alarms already became active after two months. Therefore it is hard to judge whether direct control would have worked there.