EXPLORING CENTRAL GOVERNMENTS' COORDINATION OF EUROPEAN UNION AFFAIRS
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12298 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12298
EXPLORING CENTRAL GOVERNMENTS’
COORDINATION OF EUROPEAN UNION AFFAIRS
MADS DAGNIS JENSEN
This study explores the coordination mechanisms managed by the central governments of the Euro-
pean Union (EU) in order to develop negotiation positions for their plenipotentiaries in the Council.
Utilizing novel data from an expert survey, the rst part examines the relationships within and
between the structures and processes of EU coordination, the actors involved, and the mechanisms’
efcacy. The analysis shows that highly formalized coordination mechanisms are associated with
developing timely,clear and consistent negotiation positions. The second part allocates the 28 mem-
ber states’ EU coordination mechanisms into different clusters, including unicentric, pluricentric,
decentric, proactive, reactive, politicized, depoliticized, high efcacy and low efcacy. Intriguing
differences are identied, such as the fact that the Central and Eastern European member states’
mechanisms are typically more reactive where coordination centres on the national capital and the
Council negotiations.
INTRODUCTION
Member states of the European Union (EU) are locked into the ongoing decision-making
system of the Council which generates a strong imperative for internal coordination
(Wright 1996; Kassim 2015). That imperative is not easy to comply with, as the Council is
a highly complex institution whose realm covers the adoption of legal acts, the coordina-
tion of numerous national policies, the development of the common foreign and security
policy, the ratication of international agreements and the adoption of the EU’s budget
(General Secretariat of the Council 2013, p. 7). To manage these many diverse tasks, the
Council is functionally divided. Horizontally,it is split into ten different columns covering
policy areas such as ‘Foreign Affairs’, Economic and Financial Affairs’ and ‘Environment’.
Vertically, it consists of three layers with 250–300 issue-specic working groups at the
bottom, the Comité des Représentants Permanents in the middle, and the member state
ministers at the top.
Faced with this compartmentalized decision-making system, the central governments of
all the member states each have an EU coordination mechanism that is used to crystallize
negotiation positions for their plenipotentiaries (Kassim 2013, 2015). These coordination
mechanisms have been the centre of extensive academic scrutiny for many decades (for an
overview of the literature see Jensen and Nedergaard 2015). This is not surprising given
the central role the Council occupies in the institutional architecture of the EU and the
authoritative decisions it takes, which have a substantial impact on the societies concerned
(Kassim 2015). The scholarly literature has amassed considerable knowledge about EU
coordination mechanisms through various theoretical, methodological and empirical per-
spectives.
Theoretically, the eld has drawn on different – yet partly overlapping – approaches
such as organization theory (Wallace 1973; Metcalfe 1994; Pappas 1995), institutional-
ist theory (Harmsen 1999; Bulmer and Burch 2001; Wessels et al. 2003; Dimitrova and
Toshkov 2007), theories from comparative politics (Kassim et al. 2000, 2001; Wessels et al.
Mads Dagnis Jensen is at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde School of Governance, Roskilde
University,Denmark.
Public Administration Vol.95, No. 1, 2017 (249–268)
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
250 MADS DAGNIS JENSEN
2003; Fink-Hafner 2007, 2014) as well as various theoretical lenses from the research
agenda on Europeanization (Bulmer and Burch 2001; Fink-Hafner 2007; Johansson and
Raunio 2010; Meyer-Sahling and Van Stolk 2015). This study adds a new approach by
drawing on insights from an interdisciplinary coordination theory developed by Malone
and Crowston (1991, 1994). This allows it to dene and disaggregate the coordination
mechanisms along three main dimensions: (1) organizational structures and processes;
(2) the involvement of actors; and (3) their efcacy in terms of developing timely, clear
and consistent negotiation positions.
Methodologically, the eld has utilized different research designs including in-depth
case studies (Harmsen 1999; Bulmer and Burch 2001; Laffan 2003; Fink-Hafner 2007;
Johansson and Raunio 2010), comparative case studies (Wallace 1973; Kassim et al. 2000,
2001; Fink-Hafner 2007), systematic focused comparison (Wessels et al. 2003; Kassim
2003, 2013; Dimitrova and Toshkov 2007; Panke 2010; Gärtner et al. 2011) and survey data
which have been analysed both descriptively and via regression techniques (Lægreid
et al. 2004; Jensen 2014; Meyer-Sahling and Van Stolk 2015). In this study, a network
and factor analysis is used to identify the latent pattern between the EU coordination
mechanisms’ dening items. Whereas existing studies focus on comparisons within or
between member states, the rst part of this article uses the key characteristics of the
coordination mechanisms as the unit of analysis. The method makes it possible to add
new insights to the eld by illuminating which of the constitutive characteristics of the
member states’ EU coordination go systematically hand in hand; and the possible reasons
for this.
Empirically, the eld has responded to the widening of the European integration pro-
cess by studying EC-8 (Wallace 1973), EU-12 (Metcalfe 1994; Pappas 1995), 10 small states
including nine member states (Hanf and Soetendorp 1998), 11–12 diverse member states
(Kassim et al. 2000, 2001), EU-15 (Wessels et al. 2003), the new Central and Eastern Euro-
pean member states (Dimitrova and Toshkov2007; Fink-Hafner 2007, 2014; Dimitrov,2012;
Meyer-Sahling and Van Stolk 2015) and EU-25 (Gärtner et al. 2011; Kassim 2015) as well
as EU-28 (Jensen 2014). This article provides comprehensive standardized data from an
expert survey of all 28 member states. In addition to enabling the visualization of latent
relationships among the characteristics of EU coordination, the data also make it possible
to cluster the coordination mechanisms according to theoretically derived dimensions and
determine if they vary according to whether they are placed in new vs. old, Central and
Eastern European vs. the rest, and big vs. small member states.
Taken together, the article aims to make a threefold contribution to the eld. First, it
offers a tight conceptual model for analysing the key dimensions of national EU coordi-
nation. Second, it utilizes network analysis to identify which characteristics of EU coordi-
nation correlate systematically, and factor analysis to determine whether the key theoret-
ical dimensions can be identied empirically. Third, it furnishes standardized data of the
mechanisms responsible for injecting national preferences into the EU, and whether there
is variation among different congurations of member states.
To make this contribution, the remainder of the article is structured as follows. Section
two discusses how to dene and measure the concept of EU coordination. Section three
outlines the process of data collection, validation and processing. Section four explores the
latent patterns in the different items in the data set through a network and factor analysis.
Section ve compares differences in EU coordination in different congurations of mem-
ber states, using cluster analysis. Finally, section six outlines the conclusion and presents
avenues for future research.
Public Administration Vol.95, No. 1, 2017 (249–268)
© 2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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