Reforming the equilibrium? Veto players and policy change in the European constitution-building process

Abstract

Two-level game, EU-constitution, Ratification, Referendum, Intergovernmental conference, Veto player, CHS, CE,

Domestic structures and constitution-building in an international organization: Introduction

“…Veto Players and Policy Change in the European Constitution-building Process" (König and Finke 2007) focuses on the different types of veto playersgovernments, parliamentary ratification pivots, median voters and the supranational actors-and their impact for treaty reform. Their study employs measures of the positions of actors involved at the ex ante preparatory and the ex post ratification stages of the constitution building.…”

Why risk popular ratification failure? A comparative analysis of the choice of the ratification instrument in the 25 Member States of the EU

“…(t g ): To calculate the governmental expected gains from the constitutional treaty, we use data of the DOSEI project 5 that gathered the national positions on the 65 reform issues which were negotiated at the IGC 2003/4 (König and Finke 2007). Instead of calculating the total distance of all reform issues, we use item response analysis to reduce the set of issues to a latent two-dimensional conflict space (Finke 2009).…”

“…The parameter s describes the relative salience the government attaches to one dimension as compared to the other. It has been operationalized as the relation of those summed item discrimination parameters which had been of vital interest for the respective government (König and Finke 2007;Hug and König 2002) (Hug and Schulz 2005, p. 40). We also code the status quo with reference to the treaty of Nice and the location of the constitutional treaty for each of the 40 questions.…”

Referendums in the EU’s constitution building process

“…This would have resulted in the texts referring to proposals made at very different points in time. Finally, contrary to König and Finke (2007) (in this issue), we also refrained from using data from expert surveys, since the link to positions on the constitutional treaty is tenuous at best. 29 Benoit et al (2005) apply the same methodology in their analysis of contributions to the European convention.…”