Banking on Success: The Bargaining Success of the ECB vis-à-vis the Commission and the Legislative Institutions during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis

The aim of this paper is to describe and explain the bargaining success of the European Central Bank vis-à-vis the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament during the negotiations on the report of the European Council’s Task Force on economic governance and on the legislative package known as the Six-Pack. Bargaining success is measured by proximity of the actor's policy preferences to the decision outcome on the most salient issues in the negotiations. Expectations of the bargaining success of the institutions are developed from studies on factors that increase the chances of success in the negotiations. The analyses is based on a dataset on the negotiations on the Task Force report and the Six-Pack that took place in 2010 and 2011. The findings support the contention that the European Central Bank was the second most influential player, after the Council of Ministers, in shaping the content of the Task Force report and the Six-Pack.