Large variation exists in the extent to which national interest groups focus on European Union (EU) legislation and carry out their political activities in Brussels and Strasbourg. What explains this variation? We propose a series of hypotheses that suggest that business groups, and groups...

A comparison of the results of the six most recent Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) in the European Union (EU) indicates that member governments' success in achieving substantial compromises based on issue linkages differs across cases. An examination of supranational and intergovernmental...

We argue that in intergovernmental negotiations in the European Union, large Member States, countries with a good alternative to negotiated agreement and governments facing domestic constraints are more likely to resort to a hard bargaining strategy than less powerful Member States. We test this...

The proliferation of bilateral and regional trade agreements has arguably been the main change to the international trading system since the end of the Uruguay Round in the mid-1990s. We argue that investment discrimination plays a major role in this development. Preferential trade agreements...

Since 1990 the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has increased very rapidly. This paper aims to contribute to this literature by presenting a new database on PTAs called Design of Trade Agreements (DESTA). We identified a total of 690 negotiated trade agreements between 1945 and...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until recently, however, many large-N studies have paid only scant attention to variation across PTAs in terms of content and design. Our...

Since 1990 the number of preferential trade agreements has increased rapidly. Our argument explains this phenomenon, known as the new regionalism, as a result of competition for market access. Exporters that face trade diversion because of their exclusion from a preferential trade agreement...

This special issue presents new research on the EU's role in international trade negotiations. In the introduction, we sketch out the relevance of this topic, introduce some of the core institutional features of trade policy-making in the EU, review the existing literature dealing with the EU in...

Recently, the EU concluded trade agreements with emerging markets in different regions of the world. What explains the EU's pursuit of these agreements? I present an argument that suggests that exporters in the EU mobilize in response to discrimination abroad and push the EU to conclude trade...