Leveraging politicization? National governments’ success in defining Council position for legislative negotiations.

Despite a rich literature on the dynamics and bargaining strategies used during legislative trilogue negotiations in the European Union (EU), little is known about the extent to which the initial positions of EU legislators are defined by domestic politics of the member states. Here, we investigate the conditions which enable national governments represented in the Council of Ministers to shape the overall Council position at the start of trilogue negotiations. We posit that a successful translation of the national preferences over policy outcome is mediated by the degree to which the respective policy area is politicized on the domestic level. Growing salience and contestation characterizing EU politics in the member states enable political actors to defend their stance over policy on the supranational level and steer the overall Council’s position closer to their preferred outcome. Furthermore, we anticipate that such factors as national elections and party polarization serve as additional leverage used by the Council members when framing the negotiating mandate prior to the trilogues. Our results add to the growing literature unpacking the relationship between national political dynamics and behavior of the institutions in the multilayered system of the EU. To test our expectations, we rely on a semi-supervised machine learning scaling of a new political debates dataset to map the positions of the national governments across the Union and to examine the content of the negotiation mandates. We draw on the Eurobarometer indicators to capture the domestic politicization of the EU issues across the societies and policy areas.