The Impact of National Democratic Representation on Decision-Making in the European Union

Abstract

This proposal consists of two panels aiming at discussing articles from a forthcoming special issue. These two panels focus on the impact of national democratic representation on legislative decision-making in the European Union. This proposal addresses questions at the heart of current debates on EU political crises: under what conditions and in what ways are international cooperation and EU policymaking responsive to the outcomes of national democratic processes? To what extent do increasing levels of politicisation and the rise of populist parties stymie prospects for political compromise at the international level? In what ways are the politics within and interactions between EU’s main institutions - the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament - affected by national politics? Despite heightened scholarly interest on the populist backlash against European integration, we know remarkably little about its actual impact on EU politics. The lack of cumulative growth of knowledge in this area can be partly explained by the diversity of concepts and data sources mobilised in the literature. Moreover, most of the existing scholarship focuses entirely on highly polarised or extreme cases. Consequently, the magnitude and nature of current crises, and their actual impacts on EU politics, are still open questions. The proposed panels bring together researchers who have a shared conviction that to understand the impact of national democratic representation at the international level, analyses will include a broad range of cases in a shared research design. In particular, cases should include both mainstream national governments and routine EU decisions, as well as more extreme national governments and highly controversial EU decisions. This broad context allows us to gain a comprehensive understanding of recent changes in the relationship between national representation and international cooperation. In order to facilitate a constructive dialogue, contributions broadly share a rational-choice institutionalist and comparative perspective. While rational-choice institutionalism is an established theoretical approach, each of the contributions may introduce substantial conceptual and theoretical innovations by integrating analyses of national representation and European-level decision-making. In addition, the aim is providing a context and constructive critique of this theoretical approach. Links between the contributions are further strengthened by the fact that they examine the same new and updated longitudinal dataset on decision-making, which will be released as part of a forthcoming special issue. The dataset is an updated version of the Decision-making in the EU (DEU) dataset. The new dataset includes a broad range of cases of legislative decision-making, and thus not only conveniently selected illustrations of arguments. These include cases of decision-making in the midst of national and international political crises, as well as ordinary configurations of negotiations. Previous versions of the dataset, which covered legislative proposals from 1999-2008, have been widely used, and it has now been updated to include legislative proposals from 2012-2019. Some contributions focus on specific subsets of the dataset or complement it, but all use the same evidence base of knowledge.

Title	Details
Loyal Agent or Shirking Partner: Understanding the Policy Goals of National Ministers in the Council of the European Union	View Paper Details
How Has the Composition of the EP Affected its Role in EU Decision-Making?	View Paper Details
European Union legislative negotiations, transparency in decision making, and democratic oversight	View Paper Details
Electoral Competitiveness and Responsiveness: Rational Anticipation in the EU Council	View Paper Details
Cooperation networks, national policy positions and partisan ideologies: Longitudinal evidence from the Council of the European Union	View Paper Details