Constitutional Talk: Exploring Institutional Scope Conditions for Effective Arguing

[From the introduction]. Arguing, understood as reason-giving, is all pervasive in international politics: Negotiating actors give reasons for their demands at almost any time, regardless of whether talks are con-ducted in public or behind closed doors. And yet, since negotiations have most often been conceived of as processes of bargaining in which actors seek to adjust their behavior through the exchange of threats and incentives, arguments have primarily been treated as rather epiphenomenal to strategic interaction. In this paper we argue that under certain circum-stances arguments affect negotiating actors’ preferences, and subsequently lead to outcomes that are not easily explained in pure bargaining terms. Arguing and bargaining as different modes of interaction, however, are not contending but rather complementing explanations. As a result, we have to ask which scope conditions are particularly conducive to enabling arguing to prevail in decentralized negotiations and, thus, to affect both process and outcome. In a structured-focused comparison of Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) with the European Convention we aim to unveil institutional factors that induce actors to take validity claims into account and change their preferences accordingly. At the example of negotiations on sim-plification and the single legal personality of the European Union we seek to demonstrate that the transparency of the debate in conjunction with a higher degree of uncertainty about appro-priate behavior made arguing in the Convention particularly effective

Britain’s role in world affairs will be dwarfed post-Brexit

Britain’s future role in Europe and the world is one of the key disagreements in the Brexit debate: whether it’ll surge or decline is the question? Mareike Kleine focuses on an aspect that has so far received less attention in the debate, namely the relationship between domestic politics and Britain’s role in world affairs, and concludes that a Brexit will likely condemn the UK to parochialism

Utopian fantasies: the myths peddled by referendum campaigners

The referendum question does not offer a clear choice despite the two seemingly simple alternatives. As a result, both sides of the divide try to fill the uncertainty with their own utopias and wild speculation. Mareike Kleine writes that these utopian visions of a post-Brexit Britain offer an interesting glimpse into what appears to be a deeply torn society in search of a common identity

How to be a good European Commissioner and still serve the British interest

In last week’s cabinet reshuffle, David Cameron announced that he was nominating Jonathan Hill, a relative unknown, to be Britain’s next European Commissioner. In this post addressed to Hill, Mareike Kleine provides three suggestions for how to be a good Commissioner and still serve the British interest

Informal Governance in the European Union

The European Union is the world’s most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EU’s front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices. If not the EU’s rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, Kleine proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations

Negotiating under political uncertainty: national elections and the dynamics of international cooperation

This article explores if (and how) national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature about the informational efficiency of elections, it examines how political uncertainty in the run-up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision making in the European Union (EU), it finds that (1) pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level (2) this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes and (3) the effect is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. The findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research on the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations and legislative bargaining in the EU

May’s decision to trigger Article 50 by March 2017 is unwise

The announced timing with respect to Article 50 will likely deprive Theresa May’s government of the valuable negotiation time and substantially diminish her bargaining power with the EU27. Mareike Kleine and Clement Minaudier make this argument on the basis of their research which shows that international negotiations falter when there are pending elections on the national level

Informal governance and legitimacy in EU politics

Informal governance often holds an aura of the covert and exclusive—aspects that are difficult to square with the ideal of a democratic process. Unfortunately, existing analyses mostly focus on the effect of informal governance on transparency, ignoring other channels through which a political order may generate legitimacy. However, existing analyses quite often conflate different types of informal governance or consider predominantly its effect on transparency and accountability. This paper argued that the relationship between informal governance and legitimacy is much more complex and to some extent even counter-intuitive. To see this, I distinguish three channels of legitimation—input, throughput, and output— and discuss how various forms of informal governance affect it. The paper has implications for scholarly debates on the legitimacy of global governance, studies of informal governance, and practical implications for the reform of international organizations

National elections in a globalizing world

National elections are an essential component of a democratic society. But, cautions Mareike Kleine, elections can divert attention away from ongoing international negotiations, so their timing should be carefully considered