"Bargaining Power in the European Council"

What resources grant heads of state and government influence in the European Council? Despite its political importance, the European Council has only been subject to limited research. Part of the explanation is the difficulties of conducting research on a political body that convenes behind closed doors, whose proceedings are undocumented, and whose participants are unusually hard to gain access to. This paper reports the results of a project designed to overcome the problems of previous research through a unique series of elite interviews with European heads of state and government. Drawing on general theories of negotiation, it isolates and illustrates three complementary sources of bargaining power in the European Council: state sources of power, institutional sources of power, and individual sources of power. Elite testimonies suggest that the state dimension of power is most fundamental, whereas the institutional and individual dimensions of power play a secondary role and mainly mediate the impact of structural power asymmetries