European Union policy-making requires Member States to determine national positions by means of national coordination in order to defend their preferences. This article analyses the coordination systems of the twelve "new" Member States in the middle of 2009 and compares them along the two major lines of divergence in coordination systems: their centralisation and their coordination ambition. In so doing, it ties in with a framework developed by Kassim (2003) and plots the new Member States in a diagram which is compatible with that of Kassim, including thirteen old Member States. A pronounced diversity of coordination systems in the new Member States is found. At the aggregate level, the systems are relatively decentralised. Four countries even combine this with a selective coordination ambition. The article suggests that this can be explained by a lack of resources and proposes avenues for further research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.