Although originally formulated and applied in the context of American political institutions, rational-choice institutionalist insights ‘travel’ to other domestic and international contexts, and were quickly taken up by students of the EU. Responding to the increasing importance of EU institutional rules, such as the cooperation and co-decision procedures, these authors argued that purely intergovernmental models of EU decision-making underestimated the causal importance of formal EU rules in shaping policy outcomes. In an early application of rational-choice theory to the EU, for example, Fritz Scharpf (1988) argued that the inefficiency and rigidity of the CAP and other EU policies was due not simply to the EU’s intergovernmentalism, but also to specific institutional rules, such as unanimous decision-making and the ‘default condition’ in the event that the member states failed to agree on a common policy. By the mid-1990s, George Tsebelis, Geoffrey Garrett, and many others sought to model the selection-and in particular the functioning-of EU institutions, including the adoption, execution, and adjudication of EU public policies, in terms of rational choice. Many of these studies drew increasingly on relevant literatures from comparative politics, and are therefore reviewed in the second part of this chapter.
By contrast, sociological institutionalism and constructivist approaches in international relations defined institutions much more broadly to include informal norms and conventions as well as informal rules. They argued that such institutions could ‘constitute’ actors, shaping their identities and hence their preferences in ways that rational-choice approaches could not capture (see next section).
Historical institutionalists took up a position between these two camps, focusing on the effects of institutions over time, in particular on the ways in which a given set of institutions, once established, can influence or constrain the behaviour of the actors who established them. In its initial formulations (Hall 1986; Thelen and Steinmo 1992), historical institutionalism was seen as having dual effects, influencing both the constraints on individual actors and their preferences, thereby making the theory a ‘big tent’, encompassing the core insights of the rationalist and constructivist camps.
What makes historical institutionalism distinctive, however, is its emphasis on the effects of institutions on politics over time. In perhaps the most sophisticated presentation of this thinking, Paul Pierson (2000) has argued that political institutions are characterized by what economists call ‘increasing returns’, insofar as they create incentives for actors to stick with and not abandon existing institutions, adapting them only incrementally in response to changing circumstances. Thus, politics should be characterized by certain interrelated phenomena, including: inertia, or ‘lock-ins’, whereby existing institutions may remain in equilibrium for extended periods despite considerable political change; a critical role for timing and sequencing, in which relatively small and contingent events at critical junctures early in a sequence shape events that occur later; and path-dependence, in which early decisions provide incentives for actors to perpetuate institutional and policy choices inherited from the past, even when the resulting outcomes are manifestly inefficient.
Understood in this light, historical institutionalist analyses typically begin with rationalist assumptions about actor preferences, and proceed to examine how institutions can shape the behaviour of rational actors over time through institutional lock-ins and processes of path dependence. In recent years, these insights have been applied increasingly to the development of the EU, with various authors emphasizing the temporal dimension of European integration (Armstrong and Bulmer 1998).
European integration as a process that unfolds over time, and the conditions under which path-dependent processes are most likely to occur. Working from essentially rationalist assumptions, Pierson argues that, despite the initial primacy of member governments in the design of EU institutions and policies, ‘gaps’ may occur in the ability of member governments to control the subsequent development of institutions and policies, for four reasons. First, member governments in democratic societies may, because of electoral concerns, apply a high ‘discount rate’ to the future, agreeing to EU policies that lead to a long-term loss of national control in return for short-term electoral returns. Secondly, even when governments do not heavily discount the future, unintended consequences of institutional choices can create additional gaps, which member governments may or may not be able to close through subsequent action. Thirdly, the preferences of member governments are likely to change over time, most obviously because of electoral turnover, leaving new governments with new preferences to inherit an acquis communautaire negotiated by, and according to the preferences of, a previous government. Given the frequent requirement of unanimous voting (or the high hurdle of QMV) to overturn past institutional and policy choices, individual member governments are likely to find themselves ‘immobilized by the weight of past initiatives’ (Pierson 1996b: 137). Finally, EU institutions and policies can become locked-in not only as a result of change-resistant institutions from above, but also through the incremental growth of entrenched support for existing institutions from below, as societal actors adapt to and develop a vested interest in the continuation of specific EU policies. In the area of social policy, for example, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has developed jurisprudence on issues such as gender equity and workplace health and safety that certainly exceeded the initial expectations of the member states; yet these decisions have proven difficult to roll back, both because of the need for unanimous agreement to overturn ECJ decisions and because domestic constituencies have developed a vested interest in their continued application.
At their best, historical institutionalist analyses offer not only the banal observation that institutions are ‘sticky’, but also a tool kit for predicting and explaining underwhat conditions we should expect institutional lock-ins and path-dependent behaviour.
More specifically, we should expect that, ceteris paribus, institutions and policies will be most resistant to change: where their alteration requires a unanimous agreement among member states, or the consent of supranational actors like the Commission or the Parliament; and where existing EU policies mobilize cross-national bases of support that raise the cost of reversing or significantly revising them. Both factors vary across issue areas, and we should therefore expect variation in the stability and path-dependent character of EU institutions and policies. To take one example, the EU structural funds might at first glance seem to be an ideal candidate for path-dependent behaviour, much like the CAP. By contrast with the CAP, however, the structural funds must be reauthorized at periodic intervals by a unanimous agreement among the member states, giving recalcitrant states periodic opportunities to veto their continuation.
Furthermore, because the structural funds are explicitly framed as redistributive transferring money from rich states and regions to poor ones, we see an uneven pattern of reliance upon and support for the structural funds among member states and their citizens. The practical upshot of these differences is that EU governments have been able to reform the structural funds more readily, and with less incidence of path-dependence, than we find in the CAP, which has indeed resisted all but the most incremental change (see Chapters 7 and 9).
In sum, for both rational-choice and historical institutionalists, EU institutions ‘matter’, shaping both the policy process and policy outcomes in predictable ways, and indeed shaping the long-term process of European integration. In both cases, however, the effects of EU institutions are assumed to influence only the incentives confronting the various public and private actors-the actors themselves are assumed to remain unchanged in their fundamental preferences and identities. Indeed, despite their differences on substantive issues, liberal intergovernmentalism, rational-choice institutionalism, and most historical institutionalism arguably constitute a shared rationalist research agenda-a community of scholars operating from similar basic assumptions and seeking to test hypotheses about the most important determinants of European integration.
Constructivist theory did not begin with the study of the EU-indeed, as Thomas Risse (2004) points out in an excellent survey, constructivism came to EU studies relatively late, with the publication of a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy on the ‘Social Construction of Europe’ in 1999. Yet since then constructivist theorists have been quick to apply their theoretical tools to the EU, promising to shed light on its potentially profound effects on the peoples and governments of Europe. Constructivism is a notoriously difficult theory to describe succinctly. Indeed, like rational choice, constructivism is not a substantive theory of European integration at all, but a broader ‘meta-theoretical’ orientation with implications for the study of the EU. As Risse (2004: 161) explains:
[i] t is probably most useful to describe constructivism as based on a social ontology which insists that human agents do not exist independently from their social environment and its collectively shared systems of meanings (‘culture’ in a broad sense). This is in contrast to the methodological individualism of rational choice according to which ‘ [t] he elementary unit of social life is the individual human action’. The fundamental insight of the agency-structure debate, which lies at the heart of many social constructivist works, is not only that structures and agents are mutually co-determined. The crucial point is that constructivists insist on the constitutiveness of (social) structures and agents. The social environment in which we find ourselves, ‘constitutes’ who we are, our identities as social beings. (references removed) For constructivists, institutions are understood broadly to include not only formal rules but also informal norms, and these rules and norms are expected to ‘constitute’ actors, i. e. to shape their identities and their preferences. Actor preferences, therefore, are not exogenously given and fixed, as in rationalist models, but endogenous to institutions, and individuals’ identities shaped and re-shaped by their social environment. Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, constructivists generally reject the rationalist conception of actors as utility-maximizers operating according to a ‘logic of consequentiality’, in favour of March and Olsen’s (1989: 160-2) conception of a ‘logic of appropriateness’. In this view, actors confronting a given situation do not consult a fixed set of preferences and calculate their actions in order to maximize their expected utility, but look to socially constructed roles and institutional rules and ask what sort of behaviour is appropriate in that situation. Constructivism, therefore, offers a fundamentally different view of human agency from rational-choice approaches, and it suggests that institutions influence individual identities, preferences, and behaviour in more profound ways than those hypothesized by rational-choice theorists.
A growing number of scholars has argued that EU institutions shape not only the behaviour, but also the preferences and identities of individuals and member governments (Sandholtz 1993; Jшrgensen 1997; Lewis 1998). This argument has been put most forcefully by Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jшrgensen, and Antje Wiener in their introduction to the special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy (1999: 529):
A significant amount of evidence suggests that, as a process, European integration has a transformative impact on the European state system and its constituent units. European integration itself has changed over the years, and it is reasonable to assume that in the process agents’ identity and subsequently their interests have equally changed. While this aspect of change can be theorized within constructivist perspectives, it will remain largely invisible in approaches that neglect processes of identity formation and/or assume interests to be given endogenously.
In other words, the authors begin with the claim that the EU is indeed reshaping national identities and preferences, and reject rationalist approaches for their inability to predict and explain these phenomena. Not surprisingly, constructivist accounts of the EU have been forcefully rebutted by rationalist theorists (Moravcsik 1999; Checkel and Moravcsik 2001).
According to Moravcsik (1999: 670) constructivist theorists raise an interesting and important set of questions about the effects of European integration on individuals and states. Yet, he argues, constructivists have failed to make a significant contribution to our empirical understanding of European integration, for two reasons. First, constructivists typically fail to construct ‘distinct falsifiable hypotheses’, opting instead for broad interpretive frameworks that can make sense of almost any possible outcome, and are therefore not subject to falsification through empirical analysis. Secondly, even if constructivists do posit hypotheses that are in principle falsifiable, they generally do not formulate and test those hypotheses so as to distinguish clearly between constructivist predictions and their rationalist counterparts. Until constructivists test their hypotheses, and do so against prevailing and distinct rationalist models, he argues, constructivism will not come down ‘from the clouds’ (Checkel and Moravcsik 2001).
Constructivists might respond that Moravcsik privileges rational-choice explanations and sets a higher standard for constructivist hypotheses (since rational-choice scholars typically do not attempt to test their own hypotheses against competing constructivist formulations). Many ‘post-positivist’ scholars, moreover, dispute Moravcsik’s image of EU studies as ‘science’, with its attendant claims of objectivity and of an objective, knowable world. For such scholars, Moravcsik’s call for falsifiable hypothesis-testing appears as a power-laden demand that ‘non-conformist’ theories play according to the rules of a rationalist, and primarily American, social science (Jшrgensen 1997: 6-7). To the extent that constructivists do indeed reject positivism and the systematic testing of competing hypotheses, the rationalist/constructivist debate would seem to have reached a ‘metatheoretical’ impasse-that is to say, constructivists and rationalists fail to agree on a common standard for judging what constitutes support for one or another approach.
In recent years, however, an increasing number of constructivist theorists have embraced positivism-the notion that constructivist hypotheses can, and should, be tested and validated or falsified empirically-and these scholars have produced a spate of constructivist work that attempts rigorously to test hypotheses about socialization, norm-diffusion, and collective preference formation in the EU (Wendt 1999; Checkel 2003; Risse 2004: 160). Some of these studies, including Liesbet Hooghe’s (2002, 2005) extensive analysis of the attitudes of Commission officials, and several studies of national officials participating in EU committees (Beyers and Dierickx 1998; Egeberg 1999), use quantitative methods to test hypotheses about the nature and determinants of officials’ attitudes, including socialization in national as well as European institutions. Such studies, undertaken with methodological rigour and with a frank reporting of findings, seem to demonstrate that that EU-level socialization, although not excluded, plays a relatively small role by comparison with national-level socialization, or that EU socialization interacts with other factors in complex ways.
Other studies, including Checkel’s (1999, 2003) study of citizenship norms in the EU and the Council of Europe, and Lewis’s (1998, 2003) analysis of decision-making in the EU’s Coreper, utilize qualitative rather than quantitative methods, but are similarly designed to test falsifiable hypotheses about whether, and under what conditions, EU officials are socialized into new norms, preferences, and identities.
As a result, the metatheoretical gulf separating rationalists and constructivists appears to have narrowed considerably, and EU scholars have arguably led the way in confronting and-possibly-reconciling the two theoretical approaches. Three scholars (Jupille, Caporaso, and Checkel 2003) have recently put forward a framework for promoting integration of-or at least a fruitful dialogue between-rationalist and constructivist approaches to international relations. Rationalism and constructivism, the authors argue, are not hopelessly incommensurate, but can engage each other through ‘four distinct modes of theoretical conversation’, namely: