Intergovernmental cooperation networks, national policy positions and partisan ideologies: longitudinal evidence from the Council of the European Union

ABSTRACT

This study describes and explains the evolution of cooperation networks among member states in the European Union. We examine the effects of similarities between states in their policy positions on specific controversial issues, the ideological orientations of their national governments, and the presence of populist parties in national governments. This builds on a prominent explanation of political ties, according to which political actors who share similar characteristics are likely to cooperate. The analysis examines cooperation networks in the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper I), one of the highest-level committees in the Council, in the period 2003–2018. The findings indicate that states with similar policy positions on specific controversial issues tend to form cooperative relationships, while party ideology indirectly and relatively weakly affects the formation of ties. Surprisingly, the presence of populist parties is unrelated to network evolution. These findings have implications for the extent to which cooperation in the Council is shaped by national democratic processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Networks
• Council
• ideology
• populism

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the JEPP editors, Jeremy Richardson and Berthold Rittberger, for managing the review process and to the anonymous reviewers whose constructive criticism improved the paper. Supplemental analyses and replication material can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.15129/df94ccea-ee17-451c-a243-8d36fbb7c7e5.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These three do not exhaust the range of theoretically relevant conceptualisations of ideological distances. Humphreys and Laver (2010); Benoit and Laver (2012) and Eguia (2013) provide extended discussions of other variants.

2 Coreper II is another important high-level committee in the Council. Few issues covered in the DEU dataset refer to areas covered by Coreper II, which limits our ability to examine the effects of governments’ policy positions on cooperation in that committee.

3 We measured agreement between two states on a 0-to-1 scale. We calculated the pairwise issue agreement between each pair of states as 1 – d, where d is the absolute distance between two states on the 0–100 policy scale divided by 100. The overall pairwise agreement score is averaged over all issues that were discussed in proposals introduced before the date of the NCEU survey.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Narisong Huhe

Narisong Huhe is Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, UK.

Robert Thomson

Robert Thomson is Professor at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Javier Arregui

Javier Arregui is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and Director of BACES (Barcelona Center for European Studies – UPF-Johns Hopkins University).

Daniel Naurin

Daniel Naurin is Professor at the University of Oslo, Director of the AREANA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, and Professor at the University of Gothenburg.