Do Election Campaigns and Politicization Help National Governments in the Council of the European Union?

Negotiations in the Council of the European Union are two-level games in which ministers negotiate with their counterparts at the European level while being responsible to their national electorates. According to Schelling’s “paradox of weakness”, an actor has more bargaining success if she can credibly claim that her hands are tied due to domestic pressure. Therefore, it can be expected that ministers have less leeway in negotiations at the European level, but more bargaining success if a national election is pending and/ or the EU legislative act is politicized at the national level. This effect should be stronger if the government is in electoral distress. To date, only few studies have investigated the impact of national electoral constraints on day-to-day EU policymaking. This paper uses case studies to investigate whether and how politicization and election campaigns in Germany, France and the United Kingdom influence the bargaining success of these countries’ governments in the Council. The quantitative analysis has shown that German governments tend to win in election years, while their French counterparts lose and the bargaining success of British governments is conditional on public support for the party in office. To investigate the underlying causes of this country variation, qualitative text analysis is applied to national newspaper coverage, documents of EU and national institutions and political parties. In this way, the processes of how national party politics influence policymaking at the European level are revealed. The results also shed light on negotiation dynamics in other two-level arenas like the World Trade Organization.