Who determined what governments really wanted? Preference formation and the euro crisis

Abstract

This article reviews how different integration theories interpret which political actors mattered in governmental preference formation during the euro crisis. It presents new evidence on the respective influence of national governments, European Union (EU) intergovernmental bodies – including the Eurogroup, the European Council and expert committees – supranational institutions, as well as parliamentary forces and socio-economic interest groups. Contrary to understandings of domestic preference formation as an insulated process, which precedes EU negotiations in the context of two-level games, new data on all 28 member states reveals that decision making by heads of governments and finance ministries was to a large extent decoupled from other domestic interests while EU-level forums for collective decision making played a constitutive role. The findings endorse in particular new intergovernmentalist interpretations of the euro crisis. By empirically testing competing theoretical interpretations of configurations of actor influence, this article proposes an alternative route to the study of preference formation.