Undermining the “Community Method”: the role of the European Council and legislative actors in shaping the response of the EU to the European sovereign debt crisis

This doctoral thesis describes and explains the bargaining success of the member states and the European Parliament party groups (intra-institutional actors), and the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, the European Council, the European Central Bank and the Parliament (inter-institutional) actors in the negotiations on the European Council’s Task Force report on economic governance and the Six-Pack legislative package on reforming the Stability and Growth Pact. Bargaining success is measured between the policy positions of the inter-institutional and intra-institutional actors and the decision outcomes on a wide range of controversies. Theoretical expectations on the variation in the bargaining success of the actors are developed from a wide range of studies on legislative procedures and bargaining models. The analyses are based on a dataset on the most controversial issues from the 2010 Task Force on economic governance and 2011 Six-Pack negotiations. The descriptive findings indicate that a mainly a North/East axis of member states, a right to centre constellation of party groups, the European Council, the Council of Ministers and European Central Bank shaped the outcome of the negotiations. The explanatory findings indicate that proximity to the European Central Bank and the European Council for member states, proximity to the European Central Bank and to the Council of Ministers and holding the position of rapporteur for party groups, and proximity to the European Council for the legislative institutions increased the bargaining success of the policy actors.