Projects

Do crises increase governmental responsiveness to citizens’ policy demands in the European Union? Building on the responsiveness literature, we challenge the claim that well-organized business interests determine governmental preferences in times of crisis. We argue instead, that vote-seeking governments rather account for citizens’ policy demands, given particularly high levels of saliency and public attention prevalent during crises. To test our theory, we analyse the formation of German governmental preferences on Economic and Monetary Union reforms during the Eurozone Crisis. We use novel data from the ‘EMUChoices’ project, public opinion polls as well as newspaper articles and trace the development of the German government’s positioning on reforms such as the new Eurozone bailout fund or the tightening of fiscal governance rules. Our analyses show that the German government, despite intensive lobbying efforts by banks and industry associations, responded rather closely to the demands of the public. On a normative ground, this finding highlights that input legitimacy in European Union decision-making is stronger than oftentimes assumed, at least at the level of governmental preference formation in times of crises.

This article examines the extent to which economic or political factors shaped government preferences in the reform of the Economic Monetary Union. A multilevel analysis of European Union member governments’ preferences on 40 EMU reform issues negotiated between 2010 and 2015 suggests that countries’ financial sector exposure has significant explanatory power. Seeking to minimize the risk of costly bailouts, countries with highly exposed financial sectors were more likely to support solutions involving high degrees of European integration. In contrast, political factors had no systematic impact. These findings help to enhance our understanding of preference formation in the European Union and the viability of future EMU reform.

This article analyzes the effect of Franco-German cooperation on Economic and Monetary Union reforms, negotiated between 2010 and 2015. We identify three causal mechanisms theorizing how Franco-German cooperation affected the outcomes of EMU negotiations, namely through (a) the elimination of issues from the negotiation agenda; (b) the identification of compromise solutions or the provision of compensations; and (c) the power-based imposition of joint agreements on other member states. We use process tracing to analyze almost the full sample of contested issues included in the ‘EMU Positions’ dataset. Our findings underline that France and Germany indeed eliminated issues to which they were jointly opposed, but they also positively shaped the agenda by proposing compromises and offering compensation. No evidence supports the power-focused perspective of a Franco-German directoire.

The collection of articles in this special issue provides a comprehensive analysis of European Union decision-making during the Eurozone crisis. We investigate national preference formation and interstate bargaining related to major reforms of the Economic and Monetary Union. The analyses rely on the new ‘EMU Positions’ dataset. This dataset includes information about the preferences and saliences of all 28 EU member states and key EU institutions, regarding 47 contested issues negotiated between 2010 and 2015. In this introductory article, we first articulate the motivation behind this special issue and outline its collective contribution. We then briefly summarise each article within this collection; the articles analyse agenda setting, preference formation, coalition building, bargaining dynamics, and bargaining success. Finally, we present and discuss the ‘EMU Positions’ dataset.

This article investigates the determinants of parliamentary support for international fiscal aid. Departing from the literature on presidential systems, it analyses an exemplary case of a parliamentary system, Germany. Two theoretical accounts are distinguished. The first perceives MPs as policy-seekers and focuses on the positioning of government and opposition parties and individual MPs on an economic left‒right and a pro- versus anti-EU dimension. The second regards MPs as vote-seekers and presumes an electoral district connection. The statistical analysis of a new data-set containing information on 17 Bundestag roll-call votes from 2009 to 2015 finds support for the first account: voting in favour of fiscal aid measures is mainly driven by government membership and EU support. By contrast, neither economic ideologies, nor district or mandate characteristics influence support for fiscal aid. The article contributes to a growing literature on the domestic politics of international political economy.