This article reviews how different integration theories interpret which political actors mattered in governmental preference formation during the euro crisis. It presents new evidence on the respective influence of national governments, European Union (EU) intergovernmental bodiesincluding the Eurogroup, the European Council and expert committeessupranational institutions, as well as parliamentary forces and socioeconomic interest groups. Contrary to understandings of domestic preference formation as an insulated process, which precedes EU negotiations in the context of two-level games, new data on all 28 member states reveals that decision making by heads of governments and finance ministries was to a large extent decoupled from other domestic interests while EU-level forums for collective decision making played a constitutive role. The findings endorse in particular new intergovernmentalist interpretations of the euro crisis. By empirically testing competing theoretical interpretations of configurations of actor influence, this article proposes an alternative route to the study of preference formation. KEYWORDS Preferences; euro crisis; new intergovernmentalism; European Council; Eurogroup The euro area financial crisis (in the following: the euro crisis) revived the debate on integration theory in the European Union (EU) studies literature. Authors have referred to classic approaches, such as liberal intergovernmentalism (Schimmelfennig 2015) and neofunctionalism (Niemann and Ioannou 2015), as well as to more recent theoretical frameworks on EU decision making and institutional change, such as historical (Verdun 2015) and discursive (Crespy and Schmidt 2014; Schmidt 2013a) institutionalism and new intergovernmentalism (Bickerton et al. 2015a; Puetter 2012). 1 A central, yet partially hidden, disagreement within this debate concerns the process of preference formation. Who determined what
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