Both of these books offer unique contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms that govern policymaking in the European Union. Both are characterized by high levels of scientific rigor. Both authors analyze unique data sets using state-of-the art methods that deliver highly robust results. Yet the two books have very different foci. Whereas Robert Thomson studies the making of 125 legal acts over a period from 1995 to 2004, Jonathan B. Slapin explains the reform of the European Union treaty in 1996—the so-called Treaty of Amsterdam. In other words, Veto Power studies the choice of institutions, whereas Resolving Controversy in the European Union studies the choice within those institutions. From this perspective, the two books complement each other very well, since “it is simply impossible to analyze institutional choice without first understanding institutional consequences” (Veto Power, p. 13). In what follows I highlight both books' main contributions before turning to a synthetic discussion of their strengths and weaknesses.
The structure of Resolving Controversy follows an Eastonian approach. After an extensive but highly accessible introduction to the research design, Thomson offers four chapters that summarize the policy positions and conflict patterns among member states, the European Parliament, and the Commission. Overall, he presents us with a data set that contains information on governments' positions as well as the policy outcomes on 125 legislative proposals covering a total of 331 issue dimensions. These data have been gathered by means of expert interviews, following the very successful research design by Thomson and his coeditors in The European Union Decides (2006). Most importantly, Thomson finds no systematic cleavage separating new Eastern European states from old member states. Chapters 7 to 8 focus on the policymaking processes, where the analysis confirms the resilience of informal agreements against the reform of formal institutions. When studying the gains and losses that result from policy outcomes, he finds a well-balanced political system that does not systematically discriminate against individual member states. Overall, the book portrays the EU as a rather consensual political system in which the successful resolution of controversies does not only depend on formal rules and supranational delegates.
To a certain extent, these results are in contradiction to Slapin's analysis of institutional reforms. Specifically, Veto Power has its focus on the design of those formal institutions that Thomson finds to be of limited relevance to our understanding of EU policymaking. The empirical section builds on governments' reform positions on a total of 228 issues, gathered by document analysis. Both books apply spatial models that imply a set of identical research questions, such as identifying conflicts patterns, the origins of policy positions, and, ultimately, the identification of winners and losers. However, in Resolving Controversy, Thomson constructs policy scales that range between 0 and 100. By contrast, the data used in Veto Powers is dichotomous, asking whether governments favored either reform or the status quo. Both books share a positive outlook on the democratic foundation of the European Union: Thomson finds an unhampered chain of delegation and representation. Slapin finds that governments' reform preferences match those of their parliaments and voters. Following Slapin, this link is particularly pronounced in proportional electoral systems. In addition, the results presented in his book support earlier findings by Simon Hug and Thomas König (“In View of Ratification: Governmental Preferences and Domestic Constraints,” International Organization 56 [May 2002]: 447–76), according to which governments with reform-skeptic parliamentary ratification pivots won at the Amsterdam intergovernmental conference.
At its core, Veto Power confronts the predominant “intergovernmentalist” with an “institutionalist” perspective on EU treaty reform. Following Slapin (Chapter 3), the major difference between “institutionalism” and “intergovernmentalism” is the source of power. While intergovernmentalists focus on monetary and economic resources, institutionalists focus on the voting power. From this perspective, governments can and will veto reform whenever they prefer the status quo. Slapin does a superb job of convincing us that this is indeed what happened when the 15 old member states renegotiated the Treaty of Maastricht and, eventually, agreed on the Treaty of Amsterdam. He presents an innovative operationalization and a fair comparison of the two theoretical approaches (Chapters 3 and 4). From a historical perspective, his argument appears convincing: During the last 20 years, almost all attempts to reform the Union's institutional design resulted in a compromise at the least common denominator. This changed once European political leaders agreed to change the rules of the game by adopting the Convention approach (see Daniel Finke et al., Realizing the Impossible: Reforming the European Union, 2013).
Nevertheless, I am not entirely convinced by Slapin's summary of intergovernmentalism. Do intergovernmentalists really assume that resourceful states can coerce others into accepting a treaty that leaves them worse-off? Andrew Moravcsik (The Choice for Europe, 1998) argues that losers get compensated by financial side payments. From this perspective, Slapin's approach (p. 69) to modeling governments' utility function lacks a dimension that captures such financial redistributions.
One of the most surprising results of Veto Power is the finding that small member states such as Luxembourg or Austria appear to be just as powerful as France or Germany. To some extent, this result echoes Thomson's finding that new member states (almost all of which are small) gain as much in EU policymaking as large member states. On closer inspection, both authors explain this surprising result by pointing to member states' policy or reform positions. Yet the crucial difference in Resolving Controversy is that Thomson does not specifically highlight governments' evaluation of the status quo. Instead, he points toward a balanced preference distribution, which, however, Slapin controls for in order to distinguish the powerful from the lucky.
Although the substantial empirical analysis in Veto Power focuses on one particular intergovernmental conference, the last chapter offers a historical perspective. Here, Slapin studies the conditions under which veto threats are credible and, accordingly, the veto power hypothesis holds. In short, veto power depends on the existence of outside options. Counterintuitively, the author concludes that veto power exists in case exit is not an attractive alternative to any member (p. 145). Interestingly, he argues that the most recent changes in the European Union toward “flexible” or “multispeed” integration may indicate a weakening of this veto regime. At first glance, this finding appears counterintuitive to Thomson's portrait of a political system that favors all member states to the same degree. However, this tension could potentially be resolved by focusing on those policy areas subject to enhanced cooperation.
Slapin's book appears somewhat out of date with a focus on an intergovernmental conference that took place almost 20 years ago. This does not impair its significant contribution to the literature on multilevel and federal institutions. By contrast, Thomson focuses on EU legislation initiated over a period of 20 years, which covers legislative initiatives prior to and after eastern enlargement. This allows him to study the effect of enlargement and of the variation in the partisan composition of the EU's major decision-making bodies. Given this extensive period of observation, Resolving Controversy could have benefited from a stronger focus on the effect of institutional reforms on policymaking.
Both books are comparable in using an identical modeling approach and similar methods. Both are complementary because Thomson studies the choice within rules and Slapin the choice of rules. Nevertheless, Resolving Controversy does not motivate the study of institutional design in the European Union. Thomson's results downplay the importance of formal institutions, while stressing the relevance of informal mechanisms and rules. By contrast, Veto Power studies the reform of institutional design, which presumes that formal rules such as voting thresholds and weights, the composition of the Commission, and the legislative procedures affect the distribution of powers among member states and, ultimately, the resulting policies. This tension is not resolved easily. Thomson delivers the most extensive data set on policymaking in the European Union. However, the methodological follow-ups to the original Decision Making in the European Union project highlight the difficulties in identifying the effect of procedures and institutions (e.g., see Christopher H. Achen, “Evaluating Political Decision Making Models,” in The European Union Decides; Dirk Junge, “Game Theoretic Models and the Empirical Analysis of EU Policy Making: Strategic Interaction, Collective Decisions, and Statistical Inference,” in Thomas König et al., eds., Reform Processes and Policy Change: Veto Players and Decision-Making in Modern Democracies, 2010). Moreover, it appears unlikely that Europe political leaders invest tremendous time and resources in reforming an institutional design that eventually has a limited effect on policymaking.
In sum, I strongly recommend both books to anybody interested in European Union politics. Both offer cutting-edge research that combines rigorous theoretical arguments with state-of-the-art empirical analysis.
