How the European Union does not work: national bargaining success in the Council of Ministers

Abstract

We know surprisingly little about whether the content of European Union (EU) legislation reflects the preferences of some member states more than others. The few studies that have examined national bargaining success rates for EU legislation have conceptual and methodological weaknesses. To redress these problems I use a salience-weighted measure to gauge the relative success of member states in translating their national preferences into legislation, and test two plausible, competing hypotheses about how the EU works: that no state consistently achieves more of what it really wants than any other; and that large member states tend to beat small ones. Neither hypothesis receives empirical support. Not only do states differ far more significantly in their respective levels of bargaining success than previously recognized, but some of the smaller states are the ones that do especially well. The article's main contribution – demonstrating that the EU does not work as most people think it does – sets the stage for new research questions, both positive and normative. In the last section I make a tentative start to answering two of the most important: which factors explain the surprising empirical results; and whether differential national bargaining success might undermine the legitimacy of the integration process.

Keywords:

• Bargaining
• consensus
• decision-making
• European Union
• legitimacy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Veerle Heyvaert, seminar participants at the University of Reading, University of Surrey, INSEAD business school, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Robert Thomson and Stefanie Bailer kindly provided data for replication purposes.

Notes

Throughout, when discussing the relative ability of member states to upload their preferences into EU legislation, my terminology follows that of previous studies in that I interchangeably use the terms ‘national bargaining success’, national ‘winners and losers’, and ‘congruence’ between national interests and outcomes.

It is unfortunate that the experts were not also asked to assess the relative salience of each issue against the others to produce a global ranking from 1 to 162 for each state. Perhaps such an exercise was never even feasible, given the longitudinal nature of the project and the sectoral division of labour in the Council, as it would require each expert to possess detailed recollection of negotiations on an enormous number of varied policies spread over several years.

Aksoy (2010) employs a salience-weighted loss function, but her measure differs significantly from mine in that it compares each state's preferred position to the status quo.

In multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) plots of the DEU data, legislative outcomes appear closer to the preferred points of some states than others (Thomson 2011: fig. 3.2; Thomson et al. 2004: 250), but this is not especially informative since these plots entirely ignore the issue of salience and don't assess the statistical significance of pairwise differences in distance. Others have also noted the inadequacy of using such plots for evaluating national bargaining success (Selck and Kaeding 2004: 91; Selck and Kuisters 2005: 165).