What is the nature of the preferences governments pursue in negotiations at the European or international level? Do they defend objective national interest, or are their positions also influenced by party politics? This paper presents a two-stage model of government preference formation. At the first stage, governments consider the domestic impact of the proposal in terms of the costs and benefits for important domestic groups. However, these considerations do not fully determine government positions. Instead, they merely define a corridor of feasible positions. In the second step, the government interprets the costs and benefits according to its party political ideologies and with a view to the specific interests of its respective electorates. Party political considerations may thus push the government towards a more left-wing or a more right-wing version of the ‘objective national interest’. To detect such relative effects of party politics empirically, the paper proposes to look at the positions of governments over a longer period of time in order to grasp the effect of changes of government. To illustrate the usefulness of this new theoretical and methodological approach, the paper presents first empirical results from an ongoing project on the government positions of two major European countries, France and Germany, towards two of the most contested issues in recent international regulation, climate change policy and the reduction of agricultural subsidies, in two different governance arenas, the European Union and the global level, over a period of 20 years.
