Working up the six-pack: Bargaining success in the European Council's task force on strengthening economic governance
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165231157601 |
| Author | David Moloney,Richard Whitaker |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Working up the six-pack:
Bargaining success in the
European Council’s task
force on strengthening
economic governance
David Moloney
Faculty of Humanities, Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands
Richard Whitaker
School of History, Politics and International Relations, University
of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Abstract
This article assesses the factors associated with member states’bargaining success dur-
ing the negotiations in the European Council’s 2010 task force on strengthening eco-
nomic governance, the pre-decision stage for the Six-Pack. We test theories of
decision-making based on the expertise of institutions, and EU member states’prefer-
ences and power resources using new data. With methods derived from the deci-
sion-making in the EU projects, we find that proximity to the European Central Bank
was associated with greater bargaining success for member states and that the opposite
was the case for closeness to the Commission’s preferences. We find mixed evidence
that member states’level of indebtedness is associated with bargaining success, defined
as the minimum distance between the position of a member state and the final outcome.
The findings indicate the importance of the ECB’s role given its technical expertise, in
defining the outcomes of the task force.
Keywords
Decision-making in the European Union, European Central Bank influence in policy-making,
Eurozone crisis, member state coalition, taskforce on strengthening economic governance
Corresponding author:
David Moloney, Faculty of Humanities, Huizinga Building, Universiteit Leiden, Leiden 2300 RA, the
Netherlands.
Email: david.moloney@alumnifellows.eui.eu
Article
European Union Politics
2023, Vol. 24(3) 559–577
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165231157601
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Introduction
One of the consequences of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in the European Union (EU
or Union) was ‘the emergence of the European Council as the centre of political gravity’,
as heads of state and government met frequently in an effort to stabilise the Eurozone
(Puetter, 2012: 161). Using the powers of Article 15.1 of the Treaty on the European
Union (TEU), the member states requested then President of the European Council
Herman Van Rompuy to establish, in co-operation with the European Commission
(Commission), a task force on strengthening economic governance in the EU (Task
Force) in May 2010. The role of the Task Force was to prepare for the European
Council, by October 2010, a set of recommendations to reform the EU’s economic gov-
ernance structures (European Council, 2010a).
1
While the literature acknowledges the
role of the Task Force in proposing reforms to the Union’s economic governance archi-
tecture, there has yet to be an in-depth study of this pre-decision stage of the Six-Pack
negotiations. By analysing these negotiations, this article contributes to the theoretical
debates on coalition formation and the role of Commission and the European Central
Bank (ECB) in intergovernmental decision-making on economic governance. We
address the gap in understanding decision-making processes in the Task Force by
asking how much the outcomes on the six salient issues in the Task Force negotiations
deviated from the preferences of member states, the ECB and the Commission, and
which factors are associated with the proximity of preferences to outcomes. We
answer these questions using a new dataset based on methods derived from the decision-
making in the EU projects (e.g., Arregui and Thomson, 2009).
Within these negotiations, six salient issues would emerge: (1) the linking of debt cri-
teria (a debt to GDP ratio of 60%) to the medium-term budgetary objective (MTO); (2)
the temporary suspension of funds from the EU budget for those member states that fail to
meet the debt criteria; (3) the introduction of interest-bearing deposits for member states
not meeting their MTOs; (4) the introduction of reverse qualified majority voting; (5)
greater flexibility in the excessive deficit procedure (EDP) for member states that had
undertaken pension reforms; and (6) the establishment of fiscal councils in member
states to provide economic policy advice independent of the national government.
Bargaining in the Task Force on these issues is significant because the summit partici-
pants called for secondary legislation to be fast tracked to ensure that the Task Force
recommendations on these issues were adopted (European Council, 2010b). These
recommendations would form the basis of the Six-Pack legislative package, which
came into force in 2011 (Bocquillon and Dobbels, 2014; Chang, 2013; Moloney,
2021). The Six-Pack would form the core of the reforms to the Stability and Growth
Pact (SGP).
Our findings suggest that a fiscally-conservative coalition of northern and eastern
member states was more successful in shaping the Task Force recommendations than a
southern coalition and that proximity to the ECB was associated with smaller gaps
between member states’positions and outcomes in an institutional set-up that allowed
the ECB a greater role than under normal legislative decision-making processes. Only
one of the issues in our dataset had an outcome at the least fiscally-conservative position,
560 European Union Politics 24(3)
To continue reading
Request your trial