States' bargaining success in the European Union

Abstract

This study describes and explains states' bargaining success in legislative decision-making in the European Union. We measure bargaining success by the congruence between decision outcomes and states' policy positions on a wide range of controversies. We develop and test expectations about variation in states' bargaining success from models of bargaining and legislative procedures. The analyses are based on a newly updated dataset on legislative decision-making that covers the period before and after the 2004 enlargement. The main descriptive finding is that there are no clear winners and losers among member states when a large number of decision outcomes are considered together. However, on any given issue, states typically differ markedly from each other in their bargaining success. Both bargaining models and procedural models provide insights that explain some of the variation in states' bargaining success

Determinants of bargaining success in the climate change negotiations

“…Arregui and Thomson, 2009;Thomson and Stockman, 2006;Steunenberg and Selck, 2006;Bailer, 2004;Bueno de Mesquita and Organski, 1994), the use of interview data in order to obtain the success measures carries certain risks, in particular measurement error 4 .. The obvious problem is that the maximum distances from the original positions to the negotiated outcomes are different across issues, which hampers comparison across issues.…”

“…Furthermore, some of the findings regarding the EU are inconsistent. Some researchers conclude that the negotiations are balanced over a larger number of issues, and produces neither winners nor losers (Bailer, 2004;Arregui and Thomson, 2009). Others disagree and claim that some countries perform better than others (Selck and Kaeding, 2004;Selck and Kuipers, 2005).…”

The scheduling power of the EU Council Presidency

“…Aksoy (2010) concludes that holding the Presidency during European Union (EU) budget and financial perspective negotiations increases the share of money received by a country. Only Arregui and Thomson (2009) suggest that the influence of the Presidency might have waned with the increase in the number of member states in 2004. All in all, most existing research finds that the Presidency confers some additional influence on member states, even though its effects seem to be rather modest in size (Aksoy 2010;Arregui and Thomson 2009;Thomson 2008).…”

Do votes matter? Voting weights and the success probability of member state requests in the Council of the European Union

“…Arregui and Thomson 2009, 664). Using a salience-weighted measure of bargaining success, studies either find no systematic difference across small and large member states (Thomson 2011) or report that small member states are more successful (closer to the final outcome) than larger ones despite having less votes (Arregui and Thomson 2009;Golub 2012;Cross 2013). Cross (2013) studied the effect of member states intervening at the working group or COREPER level.…”

“…Similarly, member states might merely intervene to express their discontent rather than to change negotiation outcomes (Cross 2013). Large member states might also lose more often on issues, because they simply more often have a stake in negotiations due to their more diversified economies (Arregui and Thomson 2009). In addition, smaller member states might exert more influence on those issues where they do have an interest because they can credibly claim that those issues really are vital for them (Arregui 2016).…”