Mapping Out Political Europe: Coalition Patterns in EU Decision-Making

Abstract

This article evaluates member states’ and supranational institutions’ preference patterns in European Union decision-making. We present a research design that encompasses data on the policy profiles of the 15 member states, the Commission, and the European Parliament for 70 European legal acts that were negotiated just before the May 2004 enlargement. We apply principal-component analysis which results in reduction of the different policy issues into a three-dimensional solution. The Commission and the European Parliament are much more favorable toward increased integration than the Council members are. Thus, there appears to be a “north versus south” coalition pattern rather than a “Franco-German axis.” The positions of Ireland and Belgium indicate that the member states’ status as net contributors or net receivers of European Union subsidies are important. Our findings do not support the pro-less integrationist argument nor the left-right dimension that reconciles economic and sociopolitical issues.

The effect of codecision on Council decision-making: informalization, politicization and power

“…Both the uncertainty about minister's preferences and the probability that an incorrect decision by the bureaucrat will be drawn to the minister's attention is likely to be influenced by the empowerment of the EP. The EP is known to introduce additional policy dimensions to the negotiation space (Rittberger 2000;Tsebelis 1996) and frequently occupies rather extreme positions (Kaeding and Selck 2005;Thomson 2011;Thomson et al 2004). In addition, the need for Council actors to strategically anticipate possible moves of the Parliament at later stages in the process makes the co-decision procedure considerably more complex than the consultation procedure.…”

Politicising Council Decision-making: The Effect of European Parliament Empowerment

“…The Parliament is likely to raise new issues and thereby add further dimensions to the negotiation space (Tsebelis 1996;Rittberger 2000). Also, empirical research shows that the EP often represents extreme positions compared to the member states (Thomson et al 2004;Kaeding and Selck 2005;Costello 2008). Together with the strategic considerations added by taking the EP's current and future behaviour during the procedure seriously, the decision-making situation under the cooperation and co-decision procedure is considerably more complex than under the consultation procedure.…”

Untitled

“…In that case, Poland teamed up with Sweden. Many researchers agree that the largest pre-2004 intra-EU coalitions were confined to either the north or the south, which led to a deep rift between the North and South as to the vision of integration development in Europe [18][19][20][21][22].…”