Cooperate or perish? Exploring the bargaining success of the Visegrad Group countries in the EU legislative process

The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first is to identify the factors that influence the bargaining success of the Visegrad Group countries, that is Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, in the EU legislative process. The second is to investigate whether these countries are more successful in attaining their preferred outcomes when they build a coalition by working out a common position on EU legislation, especially after the EU financial and migration crises. Drawing from the spatial model of decision-making and the theory of coalition-building in the Council, the paper delineates several hypotheses on the general and conditional effect of building a V4 coalition on V4 countries’ bargaining success. Specifically, it is expected that V4 countries are more successful in EU lawmaking when they form a coalition (general hypothesis), and that building a V4 coalition is beneficial when V4 countries hold extreme preferences on EU legislation, prefer to maintain the status quo, share national ties with a Commissioner responsible for the proposal, have a preference close to that of a member state holding the highest voting power, i.e. Germany, France, Italy, or the UK (until 31 January 2020), as well as when a legislative proposal is decided after the 2007 financial and 2015 refugee crises (conditional hypotheses). The hypotheses are tested using a multilevel linear model on the DEUIII dataset, which includes 363 controversial issues relating to 141 politically important EU legislative proposals decided between 1996 and 2019 (Arregui and Perarnaud, 2022). The analysis also includes several control variables related to, inter alia, the preferences of the European Parliament and the European Commission, policy areas, and legislative procedure.