Bargaining Success in the European Union
| Published date | 01 March 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116504040447 |
| Author | Stefanie Bailer |
| Date | 01 March 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Journal Article |
Bargaining Success in the
European Union
The Impact of Exogenous and
Endogenous Power Resources
Stefanie Bailer
University of Zurich, Switzerland
ABSTRACT
Secrecy still characterizes negotiations in the intergovern-
mental legislative body of the European Union, the Council
of Ministers. Even close observers do not know which power
resources lead to bargaining success. I distinguish between
exogenous and endogenous forms of power. Whereas the
former source of influence remains stable during the
bargaining process, negotiators can manipulate the second
form of power. With two new data sets, the analysis shows
that ‘exogenous’ resources, such as votes and economic
strength, lead to success only in certain policy fields;
‘endogenous’ resources, such as the extremity of a position
on a policy dimension and the proximity to the agenda-
setting European Commission, are more helpful in predict-
ing bargaining success. Individual negotiating qualities such
as negotiating skill and information are less essential than
the prescriptive negotiation literature and anecdotes would
have us believe.
99
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116504040447
Volume 5 (1): 99–123
Copyright© 2004
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
KEY WORDS
bargaining success
Council of Ministers
decision-making
institutions
negotiation skill
voting power
05 040447 (to/d) 9/1/04 11:26 am Page 99
Introduction
Success in negotiations is a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of
both practitioners and social scientists. Although popular literature with
hands-on bargaining advice abounds, few substantive analyses exist to
explain why some states achieve their goals in international negotiations and
others fail to do so. This article analyses how some member states in the
European Union (EU) manage to draw the negotiation outcome closer
towards their preferred position than others and which resources are crucial
in this respect. Although we have relatively detailed knowledge about the
European institutions and the formal relations between them, the negotia-
tions between the EU governments within the Council are rarely investigated.
This is because of the secrecy of this institution and the desire not to reveal
in public who won and who lost.
In this article, I try to close this research gap through an actor-level
analysis of bargaining success. I will rely on two new data sets on EU
decision-making and distinguish between two types of power that might
help member states to achieve their goals. Exogenous power resources are
determined by an actor’s environment and therefore are difficult to change
during the course of negotiations. I consider the economic power of an EU
member and the number of votes it can cast in the Council of Ministers under
this first rubric. Endogenous resources, which consist of the attributes of
negotiators and of the situation in which the bargain takes place, can be
changed during the negotiations. The second category includes the skills of
negotiators, the level of information they possess, the salience attributed to
an issue and how extreme the bargaining stance is. I investigate what
influence these power resources have on the bargaining success of the EU
member states. I will operationalize bargaining success by the distance
between the final outcome and the initial opinion of a member state at the
beginning of the negotiations. The proximity to the final outcome can, gener-
ally speaking, be a result of a government’s power or of its luck; that is to
say, it may have used its power resources to move the outcome closer to its
preference or it may have taken the outcome position by chance from the
beginning (Barry, 1980a). My research design minimizes the danger that
‘luck’ rather than ‘power’ explains how large an actor’s gain is. The large
number of cases in the data set used here allows me to investigate systemati-
cally how diverse power resources influence the bargaining success of EU
governments.
The following sections will discuss in more detail what effect the two
types of power can have in legislative bargaining within the Council. First, I
shall derive several hypotheses from the literature on power and bargaining.
European Union Politics 5(1)
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