Bargaining Power in the European Council

What grants influence in the European Council? Drawing on general theories of negotiation, this article isolates and illustrates three complementary sources of bargaining power in the European Council: state sources of power, institutional sources of power and individual sources of power. It reports...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of common market studies Vol. 46; no. 3; pp. 685 - 708
Main Author TALLBERG, JONAS
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2008
Wiley Blackwell
SeriesJournal of Common Market Studies
Subjects
Bargaining
Civil service
Councils
Europe
European Council
European Union
Grants
Heads of government
Individual behaviour
Institutions
International relations
Ministers (Political)
Negotiation
Political influences
Political power
Power
State capacity
Studies
Testimony
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Summary:What grants influence in the European Council? Drawing on general theories of negotiation, this article isolates and illustrates three complementary sources of bargaining power in the European Council: state sources of power, institutional sources of power and individual sources of power. It reports the results of a unique series of elite interviews with European heads of state and government, foreign ministers and top‐level civil servants. Elite testimonies suggest that the state dimension of power is the most fundamental, whereas the institutional and individual dimensions of power play a secondary role and mainly mediate the impact of structural power asymmetries.
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ArticleID:JCMS798
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Tenth EUSA Biennial International Conference, Montreal, 17 to 19 May 2007, the Fourth ECPR General Conference, Pisa, 6 to 8 September 2007 and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. The article draws on a more extensive report, presented to policy audiences at seminars arranged by the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies, the Swedish Representation to the European Union and the European Institute in Washington DC. The research on which the article is based was funded by the Swedish Research Council. For insightful comments and suggestions, I wish to thank, in particular, Simon Bulmer, Magnus Jerneck, Pierpaolo Settembri, Maria Strömvik, Göran von Sydow and Helen Wallace, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of JCMS.
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ISSN:0021-9886
1468-5965
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-5965.2008.00798.x