The central purpose of the paper is to explain why some officials involved in Council working groups have a more positive disposition towards European integration than others. The paper is inspired by the fact that many studies on European integration deal only occasionally with the attitudes...

Most studies of the EU and its member-states are concerned with how processes of European integration hit the member-states. This article shifts emphasis from this top-down towards a bottom-up approach and asks whether and how differences in domestic institutional constellations shape the...