Friends or Foes? The Effect of Forming a Coalition Between Poland and Germany on Their Bargaining Success in EU Legislative Decision-Making

The purpose of the paper is to empirically examine whether and how forming a coalition between Poland and Germany affects their bargaining success in the European Union’s legislative decision-making. Building a coalition is defined here as having or agreeing a common policy position on a negotiated legislative issue. The paper tests two hypotheses derived from the rational choice institutionalism and spatial theory. The first stipulates that Poland and Germany are more likely to be successful in EU legislative negotiations if they form a mutual coalition (i.e. they have a common position on the issue). According to the second hypothesis, the Polish-German coalition provides both countries with greater legislative success than an alliance with another influential member state in terms of voting power, namely France, United Kingdom, Italy or Spain. To test above suppositions, I estimate OLS (ordinary least squares) models based on the DEU II dataset created by Robert Thomson and his colleagues (Thomson et alt, 2012). This dataset contains information on 331 contentious legislative issues that arose during negotiations of 125 important EU legislative acts introduced in the years 1996-2008 under the co-decision and consultation procedures. The study utilizes two dependent variables capturing Poland’s and Germany’s bargaining success as the absolute distance between a member state’s initial policy position and the final outcome of negotiations on a given legislative issue. It is assumed that actor enjoys greater bargaining success if the final outcome is closer to its initial preference. The analysis is supplemented with control variables for the issue saliency and the policy positions of two institutional actors: the European Parliament and the European Commission. Four main conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, in line with the first hypothesis, building a Polish-German coalition has a positive, strong and statistically significant effect on both countries’ bargaining success. Second, forming a mutual coalition is more beneficial for both Poland and Germany compared to building an alliance with other powerful member state, albeit few exceptions apply to this effect. Third, Poland’s and Germany’s success is significantly and positively associated with the policy position of the United Kingdom. This result indicates that Brexit may weaken their bargaining position in the EU legislative process. Fourth, the policy position of the European Parliament is the most influential in determining the bargaining success of both Poland and Germany in EU legislative negotiations.