Institute of Political Science and International Relations

We are happy to announce that an article by Adam Kirpsza, Ph.D., entitled A colossus with feet of clay? Assessing Germany's prevalence in European Union lawmaking, has been published in "International Politics". The article challenges the common (especially in Poland) but also theoretically grounded (see the distributive bargaining theory) opinion that Germany prevails in the EU legislative process. Statistical analyses based on three data sources from 1999-2019 showed that this member state not only does not prevail, but it is also one of the most losing countries in negotiations on EU secondary legislation. The article argues that the reason for Germany's low performance is that it holds too extreme and intense preferences.

International Politics is a journal indexed in the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. It has an impact factor (IF) of 0.619 (for 2019).

Adam Kirpsza, Ph.D, is an employee of the Chair of Studies on Integration Processes headed by Professor Janusz Węc.

Abstract
The distributive bargaining literature argues that Germany prevails in the European Union due to its superior power resources. This paper tests this expectation empirically by assessing Germany’s success on actual EU legislation with three sources of data: Council voting records (2009–2019), decision outcomes on the most controversial proposals (1999–2009) and the outcomes of the Eurozone reform (2010–2015). The results provide no support for Germany’s prevalence in daily EU lawmaking. This country is found to cast a substantive number of contestations in the Council and attain significantly lower bargaining success than other member states on key EU secondary legislation. The paper suggests that such poor showing stems from a high extremity and intensity of Germany’s preferences. Generally, this study contributes to the scholarly knowledge by refuting the narrative that Germany dictates actual EU legislation and challenging the distributive bargaining argument that states with greater power resources are more successful in the EU.