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.I would like to thank Kathy Bawn, Julia Gray, Tim Groseclose, James Honaker, Joe Jupille, Thomas K nig, Jeff Lewis, Sven-Oliver Proksch, George Tsebelis, and the participants in UCLA s graduate student formal theory and statistical methods workshops for their insightful comments on various drafts of this article. I am also grateful for the comments from several anonymous reviewers and the editors at International Organization. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2006. Data and replication material are available at http: faculty.unlv.edu jslapin .
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.