Coalitions in European Union Negotiations

Coalitions will probably become an increasingly important theme in European Union (EU) politics. The spread of decision making by majority voting promotes coalition‐building behaviour. The impending enlargement is predicted to differentiate and polarize policy standpoints within the EU. Increasing levels of policy conflict imply increased propensities for coalition building. Still, the role and nature of coalitions in EU negotiations are obscure. This article raises important research questions: What characterizes coalition building in the EU? How important are coalitions? What coalition patterns are discernible?Using data from a questionnaire to Swedish participants on EU committees, it is shown that coalitions are more frequent when majority voting occurs than when unanimity rules. Coalition behaviour is, however, important also under unanimity. The existence of consensus norms diminishes the propensity to form coalitions. As regards coalition patterns, there is a prevalence of coalitions based on policy interests and/or on cultural affinity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, consistent and durable coalition patterns seem to exist. The north–south divide is one such persistent pattern. The Swedish respondents thus reveal a close cooperation between the Nordic member states and Great Britain, whereas France and Spain are seldom approached for coalition‐building purposes. As to future research, evidence from other member states and from case studies is needed in order to learn more about the bases for coalition building in EU negotiations.     

Striking a pose: Transparency and position taking in the Council of the European Union

In recent years, transparency (or the lack thereof) has become a central concern of the European Union and its attempts to increase the democratic legitimacy of the legislative decision‐making process. The claim regularly made is that increasing transparency increases the potential for holding decision makers to account. This study investigates the manner in which transparency in the decision‐making process affects the policy positions taken by negotiators at the outset of negotiations. The findings presented suggest that increasing transparency tends to lead to polarisation of negotiations, with negotiators taking more extreme positions when they know that their positions can be observed by outside parties. The implication of this result is that advocates of transparency should be aware that there is an inherent trade‐off between increasing transparency, on the one hand, and increasing the incentives to grandstand during negotiations, on the other.     

Eurosceptics in trilogue settings: interest formation and contestation in the European Parliament

Trilogues have been studied as sites of secluded inter-institutional decision making that gather the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission. Trilogues, however, are not exempt from formal and informal party-political dynamics that affect intra- and inter-institutional contestation. The increase in Eurosceptics in the 2014 EP elections offers an opportunity to investigate their efforts to shape the position and behaviour of the EP negotiating team in trilogues. Therefore, this article investigates to what extent Eurosceptic party groups participate in trilogue negotiations and how mainstream groups deal with their presence. The analysis shows that the opportunities to participate in trilogues and shape the EP’s position are higher for those perceived as soft Eurosceptic MEPs, while mainstream groups apply a ‘cordon sanitaire’ to those perceived as being part of hard Eurosceptic groups – which reduces the chances of MEPs from those groups being willing to participate in parliamentary work.     

The Distribution of A Priori Voting Power in the EC Council of Ministers and the European Parliament

One of the most important decision making bodies in the EC is the Council of Ministers. In that voting body the member states have different voting weights roughly in proportion to the size of their populations. This article focuses on the voting power of current and prospective member states (Finland, Norway and Sweden) utililizing the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices of voting power. As the decision rules play a crucial role in the computation of these indices, the a priori voting power distribution is considered under various decision rules ranging from simple majority to near unanimity. We also discuss the a priori voting power distribution of various political groupings in the current European Parliament and in the hypothetical parliament which would have Finland, Norway and Sweden as new members. Although thus far the real power base in the EC is the Commission, the analysis of voting power distributions in the Council of Ministers and in the parliament sheds some light upon the relative influence that various actors might have in EC decision-making processes.     

Institutional Arrangements and Logrolling: Evidence from the European Union

This article illustrates how voting rules used to pass a piece of legislation and the structure of the legislation, in terms of whether or not it has single or multiple issue dimensions, influence the frequency and the purpose of position changes in legislative negotiations. Through analysis of data on a set of legislative proposals negotiated in the European Union, I show that position changes are less common under unanimity rule than under majority rule. More importantly, I argue and show that when the negotiated legislation is multidimensional (i.e., contains multiple issues) and the voting rule is unanimity, position changing is a lucrative strategy for legislators. Multidimensional legislation creates opportunities for logrolling, and legislators’ veto power under the unanimity rule enables them to exploit these opportunities. Accordingly, under this scenario, legislators often engage in what I call a within‐legislation logroll and secure favorable legislative outcomes.     

Learning in Denmark? The Case of Danish Parliamentary Control over European Union Policy

The Danish parliament is renowned for its influence over Danish European Union (EU) policy. Contrary to popular belief, this strength is now in question. The most central feature of the Danish EU decision‐making model is parliamentary control over the executive expressed in political mandates before Council meetings. In 1973, this was a perfectly reasonable way for the Danish parliament to influence EU policy. Today, the status of the Council has changed, severely challenging the ability of the Danish parliament to secure influence over EU policy. This article demonstrates that the Danish European Affairs Committee is aware of the changes in European decision‐making, and that the lack of adaptation, despite this knowledge, is due to structural and cultural barriers to learning in the Danish Folketing. This study reveals that our understanding of particular responses to the pressure of Europeanization is enhanced when the conditions for learning and ‘non‐learning’ are spelled out.     

Accounting for Gender: the Role of the COAG Reform Council in Tracking Outcomes for Women and Girls Across Australia

The COAG Reform Council has played a critical role in tracking progress, nationally and on a state‐by‐state basis, against the COAG reform agenda. The council has analysed and publicly reported on governments’ performance against outcomes, performance indicators and targets agreed by COAG. However, until 2013 gender analysis was not directly incorporated in the assessment of governments’ performance. The council's first report on gender, Tracking equity: Comparing outcomes for women and girls across Australia, redressed this omission. This article explores how taking account of gender greatly enriches our understanding of governments’ performance in critical areas, and enhances public accountability as a result. An understanding of gender differences also provides a better basis for government decision‐making on ways to improve outcomes.     

Economic Actors' Political Activity in 'Overlap Issues': Privatisation and EU State Aid Control

This article considers the political activity of economic actors in what we refer to as 'overlap issues'. The cases examined here are the domestic level privatisation policy-making processes in Spain, France and Ireland, and the subsequent European Commission decisions on state aids given during the sales. Although the influence of economic actors is crucial in understanding the domestic-level privatisation aid negotiations, such actors' participation is absent in the supranational decision-making process. In order to explain this limited political activity of firms at the EU level, attention is focused on both the role of the member states and the paradoxes in EU policies that simultaneously guide and constrain the Commission from making a decision against capital.     

Straightening the three streams: Theorising extensions of the multiple streams framework

This article suggests theoretical refinements to the multiple streams framework (MSF) that make it applicable to parliamentary systems and the decision‐making stage of the policy process. Regarding the former, the important role of political parties in parliamentary democracies is highlighted. Party policy experts are expected to be members of the policy communities in the policy stream and to promote viable policy alternatives in their respective parties, while the party leadership is concerned with adopting policies in the political stream. With regard to the latter, the introduction of a second coupling process to analyse decision making more rigorously is suggested. Moreover, the article provides operational definitions of the framework's key concepts when applied to parliamentary systems and derives a systematic set of falsifiable hypotheses for agenda‐setting and decision making in these systems, thus addressing one of the main critiques against the MSF – namely that no hypotheses can be derived from it.     

Gender Equality Architecture: The Intergovernmental Level in Federal Systems

This article provides a first overall account of the intergovernmental components of Australia's gender equality architecture in the period 1978–2014. From the 1990s this is largely a story of institutional fragility. In explaining this, factors identified by scholars of state feminism, such as lack of political will, partisan ideologies and discursive shifts, particularly the increased influence of neoliberal approaches to governance, are taken into account. The new factor introduced is that of executive federalism, characterised by decision‐making behind closed doors. When women's intergovernmental bodies attempted to open doors to community input this proved fruitless, particularly in the area of economic decision‐making. Repeated attempts to introduce gender‐disaggregated reporting on the outcomes of Commonwealth‐State agreements were also largely unsuccessful. The article concludes that the democratic deficits associated with executive federalism – lack of parliamentary oversight or accountability and lack of community consultation – are closely related to the deficits in gender mainstreaming.     

Administrative Agencies and the Collaborative Game: An Analysis of the Influence of Government Agencies in Collaborative Policy Implementation

Over the past decades, most countries have witnessed an increase in collaborative arrangements for engaging stakeholders in collective decision‐making processes. Despite the fact that the role of the state in the collaborative structures has been one of the highly debated issues, there is still a need for a more comprehensive understanding of how governmental agencies affect the performance of collaborative actions. This article develops a framework for systematic analyses of collaborative effects on policy performance. Using PROCESS OLS regression, the authors apply the framework to project‐level Cohesion Policy implementation in Finland – that is, to collaborative arrangements embedded in a rather fragmented and complex administrative context. The typical state characteristics of a Nordic country make Finland an interesting case for studying the interaction in collaborative arrangements between the administration and external agencies in a modern welfare state. The results presented in this article show that government agencies have a considerable moderating impact on the relationships between collaborative qualities and performance. The impact is, however, dependent on the responsiveness of the external agent to the bureaucratic rationale. The results underline the importance of more holistic approaches for analyzing complex collaborative constellations, focusing particularly on interaction effects between potential explanatory factors.     

Decision costs in legislative bargaining: an experimental analysis

We conduct an experiment to assess the effects of different decision rules on the costs of decision making in a multilateral bargaining situation. Specifically, we compare the amount of costly delay observed in an experimental bargaining game under majority and unanimity rule. Our main finding is that individual subjects are more likely to reject offers under unanimity rule. This higher rejection rate, as well as the requirement that all subjects agree, leads to more costly delay. This result provides empirical support for a classic argument in favor of less-than-unanimity decision rules put forth by Buchanan and Tullock (The calculus of consent: logical foundations of constitutional democracy, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1962).     

‘Overcoming the divide’ between comparative politics and international relations approaches to the EC: What role for ‘post‐decisional politics'? 1

Political scientists have normally considered the European Community (EC) from the standpoint either of international relations or comparative politics/public policy. Although the division between the two sub‐disciplines of political science is well known and deeply rooted, it is now commonly viewed as a barrier to greater understanding of the neo‐state structure of the EC. Using a case study of the implementation of EC coastal‐bathing water policy in Britain over the last 20 years, this article argues that closer investigation of the long‐term outcome of individual policies at the national and sub‐national level provides a sounder basis upon which to adjudicate between the two main theories of integration, namely inter‐governmentalism and neo‐functionalism, than studies of short‐term policy outputs emanating from the Council of Ministers or the grand ‘history‐making’ bargains hammered out in the European Council.     

Agent heterogeneity and consensual decision making on the Federal Open Market Committee

The consensual aspects of decision making are essential for understanding policy made by administrative organizations that take the form of a commision or board. Consensual decision making reflects the degree of policy cohesion exhibited by high-level officials within administrative organizations. It is proposed here that this type of behavior may differ between heterogeneous agents. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve System serves as a salient setting for testing these propositions in a time series context. The empirical results indicate that major intra-institutional differences exist between Board of Governor (BOG) and Regional Bank President (RBP) members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regarding consensual behavior. In terms of policy decision making, the econometric evidence clearly demonstrates that the consensual behavior of these agents are fundamentally different from one another. This in turn has important implications for the study of other commission and board policy making bodies that consist of agents who are not all homogeneous.     

Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party

This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the basis of ethnicity. Indirect welfare chauvinism is the result of policy measures that apply to both natives and immigrants, but which deliberately negatively affect immigrants the most. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of labour market reforms in Denmark, where one of the most successful populist right‐wing parties in Europe – the Danish People's Party – held a pivotal position in the period 2001–11, the article traces the intentions and deliberate policy‐making strategies of the party. It shows that the distinction between direct and indirect chauvinism is a useful theoretical tool for understanding how the Danish People's Party can fulfill the expectations of both its electorate and its coalition partners, even if they point in different directions.     

The Promise and Pitfalls of Consensus Decision Making in School Management

School/Community‐Based Management (SCBM) advocates insisted that changing the bureaucratic structure of governance, moving from top‐down decision making to a shared decision making at the local level, would revolutionize schools and result in higher student achievement. Many schools have struggled with shared decision‐making processes. This article examines one high school's attempt to implement a dress code using consensus‐based decision‐making. Organizations that strive to make decisions by consensus should be aware of the pitfalls that may occur and work to address them if they arise.     

Begrenzte Rationalität und regulatives Lernen in der EG: die Liberalisierung der Elektrizitätsversorgung

The article analyses the liberalization of the EC electricity supply industry. Confronting the intergovernmental approach, the case study is based on the premise that the member state executives act within the limits of a bounded rationality and do therefore not always represent clear and fixed interests in EU negotiations. Taking the examples of France and Germany, it shows that the national positions and preferences may change greatly during the course of the decision making process. While the French positional changes may be reasonably well explained by the intergovernmental approach, the German preference changes are attributed to effects of the EC institutions and negotiations. Institutional principles, policy-concepts and fairness criteria guide member state orientations and behavior and hinder the pursuit of unilateral advantages. Incremental negotiation techniques within the Council induce learning processes and cause reassessments of the domestic situations. Furthermore, the EC decisions may cause behavioral changes which clearly surpass their regulatory content even if they contain extensive flexibilisation mechanisms.     

The role of independent regulators in policy making: Venue‐shopping and framing strategies in the EU regulation of old wives cures

This article addresses debates on the formulation of public policy, building upon a body of literature which has focused on the interconnectedness between the venues of policy action and the way issues are defined. It does so by focusing on the strategic role of policy actors in a policy subfield and their attempts at manipulating either frames or venues in order to shape policy. The novelty here consists in pointing to the involvement of regulators in such strategic action. An emerging body of research has indeed shown that the activity of formally independent regulators is not necessarily limited to the implementation of delegated regulatory competencies and that they are increasingly engaged in policy‐making activities. Thus, by resorting to the agenda‐setting and framing literature, the article sheds light on novel pathways through which regulators intervene in policy‐making activities, making a claim that they have very good ‘tools’ at their disposal in order to shape policy. These dynamics are examined in the case of the last piece of the EU's pharmaceutical framework – the 2004 Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicines – which provoked intense debate among manufacturers of herbals, retailers, consumers, and both EU‐level and domestic‐level regulatory authorities.