With a little help from the state: interest intermediation in the domestic pre-negotiations of EU legislation

Theories of interest intermediation maintain that the formation of bargaining positions in the European Union follows a distinctive bargaining style. This article evaluates such claims empirically. It compares the predictive accuracy of Nash bargaining models which take the salient features of five types of interest intermediation into account. We show that the interaction between government agencies, interest groups and parties in the formation of EU legislation is largely étatiste. When important private interests are at stake, the pattern is also quite often clientelistic or corporatist. The dominance of the state in the less politicized decision-making processes is apparent in all four countries under consideration: Finland, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. Consociationalist arrangements are rare in this arena of public policy-making.