Do Member States’ permanent representations matter for their bargaining success? Evidence from the EU Council of Ministers

ABSTRACT

How can differences in Member States (MS) capacities to coordinate European Union (EU) decision-making processes influence their bargaining success? Based on a new dataset collected with Council representatives and policy experts in Brussels, this research shows how informal MS capacities can partly shape legislative outcomes in the EU under certain conditions. This research provides evidence that informal capacities, such as the effectiveness of MS permanent representations and/or their capacity to coordinate with other actors in the legislative decision-making, matter for bargaining success. Using a mixed-method design, this research illustrates how both the structure preference allocation and thresholds of formal power are conditions of informal power resource activation.

KEYWORDS:

• Bargaining success
• Council of the EU
• informal capabilities
• Member States
• power resources

Acknowledgements

We thank Robert Thomson, Mareike Kleine, Jonas Lefevere, Samuel Standaert, Francesco Camonita, David Puig, the editors and the anonymous reviewers for comments that improved previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Informal capabilities in this article refer to power resources mobilized by MS as part of the EU decision-making process, which are distinct from formal/institutional resources such as voting power. For instance, informal capabilities can refer to actors’ level of access and coordination with others, the individual capacities of negotiators, and the efficiency of the bureaucracy.

2 Complementing previous efforts to measure MS capacities (Verheijen, 2007) and differentiate coordination processes (Laffan, 2006), this article introduces new indicators specifically relevant to the study of EU decision-making processes and bargaining success.

3 This variable of network capacity has so far shown limited explanatory power of bargaining success. Investigating whether MS with more network capital have more bargaining success, previous studies have signaled a modest effect of this measure (Golub, 2012; Lundgren et al., 2019).

4 Data from the first version of the dataset (EU-15, DEU-I) was not included because it was not possible to obtain data about the informal capacities of almost half of MS, as they were not members of the EU.

5 More detailed information about the dataset, its methodology of elaboration and the reliability assessment of the data is available in the online appendix (https://doi.org/10.34810/data50).

6 See the correlation matrix and robustness checks in the appendix.

7 All models exclude observations with missing values for the covariates.

8 See also a spatial representation in the online appendix.

9 Interview with MS representative. 13/05/2019.

10 Interview with MS representative. 23/05/2018.

11 Interview with MS representative. 23/05/2018.

12 Interview with MS representative. 23/05/2018.

13 Interview with MS representative. 23/05/2018.

14 Interview with MS representative. 13/05/2019.

15 Interview with MS representative. 30/05/2018.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant CSO2015-67213-C2-2-P; it was also supported by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union under Grants 611941 – EPP- 1-2019-1-ES-EPP-JMO- CoE (Barcelona Center for European Studies) and 600488 – EPP- 1- 2019- 1- ES- EPPJMO- CHAIR (Jean Monnet Chair in European Governance)

Notes on contributors

Clément Perarnaud

Clément Perarnaud is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and an Associate Fellow at the Brussels School of Governance (BSOG-VUB).

Javier Arregui

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