Exchange and Compromise in the European Union. Abstract - Arregui, J., Stokman, F.N. & Thomson, R. (2006). Exchange and Compromise in the European Union. In: R. Thomson, F.N. Stokman, C. Achen, and T. Koenig (eds.).

According to the account of European Union (EU) decision making proposed in this chapter, this is a bargaining process during which actors shift their policy positions with a view to reaching agreements on controversial issues. Formal institutions, such as the procedural rules, matter in this process. They influence the set of actors included in the process and their relative weight or power. The observation that actors shift their positions, and cajole or compel others to shift theirs, is central to our conception of political bargaining. The models we focus on in this chapter are the position exchange model (Stokman and Van Oosten, 1994) and the challenge model (in other studies this model is also referred to as 'the expected utility model'; Bueno de Mesquita, 1994). These models belong to a class of rational choice models of collective decision making that distinguish between two stages of the decision making process, the influence stage, and the the final decision or voting stage.

Download hier de publicatie