Abstract
This article introduces a new concept to negotiation research in political science: negotiation effectiveness. Prominent research focuses on negotiation success, capturing the extent to which a country's initial preferences are reflected in the final outcome. By contrast, focusing on the effectiveness of negotiation strategies allows examining the process by which congruence between initial positions and final negotiation outcomes can be achieved. Negotiation effectiveness measures how effectively a negotiator changes the elements of a policy for which her country developed positions on the basis of its preferences by applying negotiation strategies and by using negotiation capacities. On the basis of an analysis of the European Union's (EU's) day-to-day negotiations, the article maps the differences in the negotiation effectiveness between states. Why are some countries much more effective in shaping EU policies than others? Why do some small countries punch above their weight, while some of the bigger countries are less effective than their size let us expect? In order to answer these questions, the article develops a set of hypotheses and tests them empirically.
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In international negotiations, where a large number of policy proposals are on the table, bigger states can more easily afford to develop national positions on a broader range of issues in a given policy proposal than smaller states. As a consequence, the delegations of smaller states tend to have negotiation instructions that focus on fewer agenda items than bigger states. Against this background, it is not surprising that, for example, in negotiations of the EU, bigger member states tend to be more successful overall in influencing outcomes than smaller member states (for example, Moravcsik, 1991; Stokman and Thompson, 2004, p. 6; Bailer, 2006, p. 368).
The term ‘negotiation effectiveness’ is frequently used by negotiators and in psychology or management studies to capture the actual behaviour of an actor in negotiations and its implications for achieving her goals (for example, Vidmar, 1971; Scanzoni and Godwin, 1990; Butler and John, 1999).
The vast majority of EU polices are decided by the working parties of the council of ministers and the COREPER (Beyers and Dierrickx, 1998). Smaller states have slimmer ministries and less personnel to prepare for these negotiations in order to influence EU directives or regulations ‘Bigger states have bigger delegations with more expertise and experts and better prepared proposals’ (interview PermRep no. 2, 10 April 2008, c.f. Kassim et al, 2000; Kassim and Peters, 2001, p. 300; Panke, 2010). In response to such size-related difficulties, small states have adjusted their negotiation behaviour. Acknowledging that a single proposal for a new EU directive or regulation usually has hundreds of individual agenda items (for example, Ministry of Agriculture no. 10, 06-01-10), states do not develop positions on all of them, but are selective. They prioritize dossiers and invest available power resources in issues of great importance (for example, interviews PermRep no. 15, 10 July 2008; PermRep no. 39, 3 December 2008). For example, an official stated, ‘The capital develops positions when there is a need to, when they have a special interest. But most of the time in the trade area we are just fine. None of the countries intervene at every item that is being discussed’ (interview PermRep no. 25, 23 July 2008). Smaller states facing severe capacity limitations tend to have a very limited number of positions, whereas bigger states can afford to develop and pursue a higher number of positions in relation to a draft EU directive or regulation. One official from a small state stated: ‘We are often quite short on resources. (…) That basically means that we are forced to focus on what is most important’ (interview PermRep no. 9, 29 May 2008). A colleague reinforced this point, ‘I think you have to be somewhat selective in what it is that is really important to you. I mean, unlike some of the bigger member-states you will not be able to have an input into each and every issue that is discussed, and you have to choose the topic that you really want to have an impact on, but then you have to put all your effort into that one’ (interview PermRep no. 47, 5 February 2009).
This is particularly problematic as the models that the majority of quantitative approaches test do not distinguish between negotiation success, due to the efforts of a particular state, and a coincidental overlap between initial positions and policy outcomes, that has nothing to do with bargaining power or the negotiation strategies of the state itself but is a solitary product of another actor's actions.
In addition to the survey, the project carried out more than 100 interviews with members from the 27 permanent representations and the line ministries as well as the commission and the European Parliament (c.f. Panke, 2010).
Question number 16 stated ‘On average, how often do you successfully change parts of the text of a European directive or regulation according to your positions?’ For each answer, the respondents could chose between 1 – corresponding to never, 2 – seldom, 3 – sometimes, 4 – occasionally, 5 – often, 6 – frequently and 7 – very frequently. The dependent variable in the data set with the responses of the individual negotiators has a minimum value of 1, a maximum value of 7, a median of 4 and a means of 4.151.
A survey that asks for the average rates of negotiation effectiveness in a policy area cannot control for the distribution of positions of the 27 states, the commissions, and the EP for each of the files and items on the negotiation table. This does not bias the survey results as interviews revealed that particular states are not always in the middle or at a particular end of the policy spectrum. Rather, interviewees reported that the distribution of states’ positions varies considerably in each policy area, for each directive or regulation, and for each of the often more than 100 individual items discussed in a draft legal act. For instance, it cannot be assumed that Luxembourg usually has a position in the middle of the preference spectrum between states or a position close to the commission, and is therefore very influential.
Sweden (5.4), France (5.3), Ireland (5.2), Belgium (5.1), Finland (5.1), Germany (5.1), Denmark (5.0), Spain (4.9) and the Netherlands (4.8) as well as the United Kingdom (average of 6.2).
Italy (4.3), Poland (4.2), Portugal (4.1), Luxembourg (4.1) and Austria (4.0).
Cyprus (3.4), Malta (3.3), Romania (3.3), Slovak Republic (3.3), the Czech Republic (3.3), Estonia (3.3), Bulgaria (3.2), Slovenia (3.1), Lithuania (3.0), Greece (3.0), Latvia (2.9) and Hungary (2.8).
The data on the use of the negotiation strategies stem from the 2009 survey, which asked how often, on average, negotiators voice national, form coalitions, act as a neutral mediator, advance expertise-based arguments or engage in problem solving during council working party and COREPER negotiations in the three selected policy areas (agriculture, economy and environment) (c.f. Panke, 2010). The questions were: On average, how often do you voice national concerns in negotiations? On average, how often do you join a coalition? On average, how often do you act as neutral mediator between states in negotiations? How often do you provide expertise to other states in negotiations? and How often do you constructively propose compromise formulations in the text during negotiations?
Multicollinearity problems concerning the use of shaping strategies are not present. It is not the case that a negotiator applies one strategy at the expense of another. The use of the strategies is positively correlated, but not to a high extent (the strongest correlation is present between general arguing and bargaining (0.609), followed by general arguing and problem solving (0.566)).
Negotiation effectiveness is the frequency to which an individual participant actively manages to influence the elements of an EU directive or regulation for which her country has a position in line with her instructions.
If the bold line is decreasing, the increase of resources reduces the effect of the strategy on negotiation success; if the bold line is increasing, the increase of resources increases the effect of the strategy on negotiation success; if the bold line is straight, the resource does not modify the effect of the strategy on negotiation success at all.
Interaction effects are only significant for ranges in which the lines for the 95 per cent confidence interval (the dotted line) are both either positive or negative. For ranges in which one of the dotted lines crosses the x-axis, the interaction effect is not significant.
This case study was selected because it allows illustrating under which conditions, the different negotiation strategies become effective in influencing the final policy outcome.
These are centre (Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Luxemburg, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and the United Kingdom), South (Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Cyprus, Malta and Portugal) and North (Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Sweden).
The case study rests on a more nuanced operationalisation of ideational capacities in focusing on the knowledge about the issue at stake, whereas the quantitative part uses the duration of membership a proxy for ideational capacities, because no fine grained, policy or even issue-specific data are available to measure the ideational capacities on this level of aggregation.
‘What the Swedes did was they had a chemical institute which put a scientific report where they tried to say that these are the consequences if you define endocone destructive properties as so on so and so then you can calculate and you can reach the following conclusions in terms of which substances have to be scrapped and banned and which won’t’ (interview PermRep no. 58, 20 March 2009).
Insufficient technical expertise led to the omission of presenting compelling, strongly supported claims and a lack of EU knowledge led to the presentation of the argument at the very end of negotiations when the deal has largely been struck.
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Acknowledgements
This article is part of the research project ‘Small States in the European Union. Coping with Structural Disadvantages’, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS). I am grateful to the officials in member states and EU institutions who volunteered for interviews and who participated in the survey. I would also like to thank Lisa Ahles, Josè Canto, Conor Feighan, Yulia Kasirava, Natalie Manning, Stephen Massey, William Patrick O’Brien, Maria Polyak, Paul Quinn, Michael Verspohl and Kateryna Zarembo for their research support in various stages of the project.
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Panke, D. Negotiation effectiveness: Why some states are better than others in making their voices count in EU negotiations. Comp Eur Polit 10, 111–132 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2011.3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2011.3