Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe joint decision trap concept traditionally explains progress in EU policy‐making through dynamics located within the EU's multi‐level governance. Yet, with the expansion of global regulatory co‐ordination, the EU governance system increasingly interacts with policy‐making in international regimes, which influences the internal dynamics of the EU's decision‐making. This article seeks to refine the joint decision trap model by introducing global exit mechanisms and illustrating their empirical relevance for the case of accounting standards. The global exit builds on leveraging the outside benefits of global policy, the legitimacy of global standards, and new opportunities for locking in policy preferences through global commitments. Specifically, the accounting case demonstrates the Commission's strategy of 'harmonizing globally to harmonize internally' that produced an agreement after decades of stalemate. Moreover, it demonstrates how the global exit enables the Commission to protect internal harmonization despite the growing criticism and calls for the repatriation of regulatory sovereignty.

The interactions between the European Union (EU) and international policy regimes are ever more important. Much of the existing literature has focused on the bottom-up dimension of the EU's role in global institutions, assuming that the EU predominantly seeks to project its policies to the global level. However, our review of empirical research reveals that EU policy exports tend to be rare and that EU-global interactions are more varied. On a global scale, the EU is not a hegemonic power that can easily transfer its standards to international regimes, nor does it always desire to do so. This article conceptualizes the EU's interactions with international institutions in four modes (policy export, policy promotion, policy protection and policy import), establishes different rationales motivating EU actors to engage through a given mode and relates recent empirical research to this comprehensive typology. Adapted from the source document.

"Recent Eurozone reforms mark the most profound deepening of European integration since Maastricht. This book analyses how member states formed preferences in the politics of these reforms, and how preferences translated into policy outcomes on the European level. The chapters summarize insights on the role of different actors and institutions from four datasets based on 200 expert interviews, the analysis of 5000 policy documents and constitutional court cases in all EU member states. The findings confirm some common wisdom, dispel some myths, and provide insights into mechanisms facilitating further reforms. While quantitative analyses show that 'Northern' and 'Southern' member states were deeply divided, case study chapters provide more refined view. Empirical data also indicate that reform decisions were dominated by governments and EU institutions but dispel the notion that Germany alone imposed its preferred policy. This book goes further and unpacks the legacies of the EMU crisis that make future reforms dependent on the reduction of financial sector risks, which is a necessary condition for rebuilding trust and restarting the gradual convergence of Eurozone reform preferences."

AbstractIn the multilevel system of the European Union (EU), national governments have been empowered at the expense of parliaments. We study the executive power shift in EU politics in the formation of national preferences. This article shows that governments are more likely to integrate parliaments and external actors, such as other governments and EU institutions, when they advocate extreme bargaining positions in EU negotiations. We theoretically develop this argument and provide an empirical study of Eurozone politics, covering the preference formation of 27 EU member states. The analysis shows that the executives are overall the dominating power: most of the time, governments form national preferences on their own. When governments integrate additional actors, they mostly rely on external actors and do so to avoid blame and to shift responsibility. These findings question whether the integration of national parliaments in EU politics indeed addresses democratic accountability concerns.

The collection of articles in this special issue provides a comprehensive analysis of European Union decision-making during the Eurozone crisis. We investigate national preference formation and interstate bargaining related to major reforms of the Economic and Monetary Union. The analyses rely on the new 'EMU Positions' dataset. This dataset includes information about the preferences and saliences of all 28 EU member states and key EU institutions, regarding 47 contested issues negotiated between 2010 and 2015. In this introductory article, we first articulate the motivation behind this special issue and outline its collective contribution. We then briefly summarise each article within this collection; the articles analyse agenda setting, preference formation, coalition building, bargaining dynamics, and bargaining success. Finally, we present and discuss the 'EMU Positions' dataset.