Abstract:
This
article examines how European Union member states make choices
about political institutions at intergovernmental conferences,
the grand negotiations
where many key institutional changes are made. Using data on
member-state preferences
from the intergovernmental conference leading to the Treaty
of Amsterdam, I
test competing bargaining theories, institutionalism, and intergovernmentalism,
and
present strong evidence that institutionalism better captures
negotiations compared to
intergovernmentalism. I present a formal model to discern between
these competing
theories of bargaining power, derive a statistical model directly
from this formal model,
and then use data from the European Union’s Treaty of
Amsterdam to test these theories
and corresponding power sources. Veto power associated with
institutional models
better explains intergovernmental conference outcomes compared
to power from
size and economic might, often associated with intergovernmental
analyses.
