How institutional environments facilitate co-operative negotiation styles in EU decision-making

Thinking of the European Union's (EU's) Council system in terms of institutional environments can help generalize the scope conditions under which co-operative styles of negotiation develop and become durable over time. Analytically, we expect to find that those institutional environments which code higher on a set of four independent variables should exhibit more robust patterns of co-operative negotiation; that is, are highly insulated from domestic audiences, transact with wide scope, high interaction intensity, and/or maintain a high density of norms and group standards. This in turn offers a concrete application of the sociological argument that EU institutions not only matter, but shows how, by building legitimation and appropriateness standards into the negotiation process, institutional environments can place limits on instrumentalism.