When Neighbours Team Up: The Influence of Regional Groupings on Bargaining Outcomes in European Union Policy-Making

This paper systematically investigates the influence of regional groupings operating within the European Union on bargaining outcomes in the EU legislative process. While existing scholarship has examined the determinants of member states’ bargaining success in EU lawmaking (e.g., Arregui 2016; Arregui and Thomson 2009; Bailer 2004; Cross 2013; Lundgren et al. 2019; Mariano and Schneider 2022), the role of regional partnerships in this context has been largely overlooked. Nevertheless, prior research has demonstrated that member states often hold similar preferences within the regional groupings to which they belong, thereby fostering the formation of regional coalitions during negotiations (e.g., Bicchi and Arregui 2023; Naurin and Lindahl 2008; Thomson 2009). This is a crucial insight, as decisions in the Council, the EU’s main legislative body, are typically adopted by qualified majority voting, meaning that these alliances may exert significant influence on the final shape of legislation. Hence, an important question arises: to what extent do specific regional groupings shape legislative outcomes in the EU, and which factors make them more successful in attaining their policy preferences? The paper addresses these issues in two steps. First, it provides a comparative assessment of the bargaining performance of several key regional groupings in the Council, including the Weimar Triangle, the Visegrad Group, the Nordic Council, the Benelux Union, the Baltic Assembly, the EU Med Group, the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS), the Nordic-Baltic Eight, EUSALP (EU Strategy for the Alpine Region), and Hansa (the New Hanseatic League). Bargaining performance is measured as the extent to which their collective preferences are reflected in final legislative outcomes. Second, the paper conducts a statistical analysis of the determinants of these regional groupings’ bargaining success in EU policy-making. Drawing on key theories of EU decision-making, such as coalition-building in the Council, cleavage theory, rational choice institutionalism, network capital theory, and relais actors theory, hypotheses are formulated regarding the effects of specific factors on their success in legislative negotiations. These factors include internal cohesion (both in terms of policy preferences and government ideology along left-right and pro-/anti-EU dimensions), voting power, preference characteristics (e.g., extremity, intensity, and congruence with the positions of the Commission and the European Parliament), the level of internal cooperation within the grouping (frequency of contacts, network capital, experience, and the existence of stable coordination structures), and holding key offices by grouping members (including the Council Presidency and the Commissioner responsible for the proposal). Both the comparative analysis and hypothesis testing will be conducted using statistical methods (non-parametric tests and a multilevel generalized linear model) on the DEUIII dataset, which captures actors’ preferences and negotiation results for major EU legislative acts decided between 1996 and 2019 (see Arregui and Perarnaud, 2022). Together, the findings aim to advance our understanding of how regional cooperation shapes legislative outcomes in EU lawmaking.