Government Preferences on European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories

Abstract

This essay examines the causes of government support for European integration. It evaluates several competing theories, both material and ideological. Two dependent variables are examined: government support for European integration in Council of Ministers decisions, and in the 1997 Amsterdam intergovernmental conference. There appear to be sharp differences between the two decision-making fora in the efficacy of predictive variables. In the Council of Ministers, left-right political ideology and financial transfers from the European Union to member states provide the best explanations. In the Amsterdam conference, experience in the Second World War and financial transfers provide the best explanations. This research extends our understanding of why governments choose co-operation within the European Union. It also extends our understanding of the relationship between ideology and integration preferences. Ideology matters not just to parties, but also to governments, which represent both territorial interests and ideologies. There appears to be a linear relationship, whereby left governments are more supportive of integration than right governments.

For Business, for Pleasure or for Necessity? The Czech Republic's Choices for Europe

“…Dependency can occur in one of two ways: in relation to EU funds and to trade. As Aspinwall (2007) argues, poorer member states which are net recipients of funds have an incentive to support further integration, especially in policy areas where funds flow from the richer to the poorer member states. Meanwhile the salience of trade dependency has been emphasised by transactionalists who believe that forms of interaction such as trade may affect views about the merits of European integration (e.g.…”

“…These areas have been chosen to assess the explanatory power of ideology, dependency and the influence of powerful societal groupings. If ideology matters, for example, then in the socio-economic field the replacement of the centre-left government led by the social democrats with one led by the centre-right Civic Democratic Party following the 2006 elections should have provoked a shift in preferences on liberalisation, although we might not expect such a change in a policy area such as enlargement which in a similar vein to foreign and defence policy is not thought to be as sensitive to changes in governments' ideology (Aspinwall 2002(Aspinwall , 2007.…”

Domestic Politics and European Treaty Reform

“…In particular, they consider reform positions to be a function of producer interests. Countries that stand to benefit from the enhanced trade and competition in the Single European Market (SEM) are thought to favour a high level of integration (Aspinwall, 2007;Moravcsik, 1998). According to Aspinwall (2007), the same holds true for member states that receive high net transfer payments from the European Union (EU) budget.…”

“…Countries that stand to benefit from the enhanced trade and competition in the Single European Market (SEM) are thought to favour a high level of integration (Aspinwall, 2007;Moravcsik, 1998). According to Aspinwall (2007), the same holds true for member states that receive high net transfer payments from the European Union (EU) budget. In contrast, König and Bräuninger (2004) argue that EU net payers will have a limited interest in further expanding the EU budget.…”

Operationalizing national preferences on Europe and differentiated integration

“…Moreover, it is only by drilling all the way down to the positions that individual political parties take on particular policies open to differentiated integration that we can really understand the positions that governments and states take on integration. Yet most existing studies do not take differentiation into account: most of them analyse party preferences on European integration as a whole (e.g., Hix 1999;Hix and Lord 1997;Hooghe et al 2002;Marks and Steenbergen 2004;Marks and Wilson 2000;Ray 1999), or they focus on broad government positions taken at the European level (Aspinwall 2002(Aspinwall , 2007. Similarly, the literature on partybased Euroscepticism offer a series of competing typologies that present a series of terminological issues and focus on the issue of 'Europe' as a whole (Kopecký and Mudde [2002]; Taggart and Szczerbiak [2001]; Usherwood and Startin [2013]; see below).…”