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...