Joseph Jupille

The European Union and International Outcomes

Analysts of the European Union (EU) and international bargaining have generally failed to appreciate how the shift within the EU from unanimity to qualified majority voting has affected European bargaining positions and international outcomes. I analyze the international effects of changes in EU decision-making rules with a simple spatial model and assess the utility of the model in two cases of environmental bargaining that span the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty. The EU can decisively shape international outcomes by concentrating the weight of its fifteen member states on a single substantive position and rendering that position critical to any internationally negotiated agreement. The findings generalize to numerous areas of EU external relations and suggest that analysts should attend specifically to the EU and more generally to domestic and regional institutional factors in explaining international bargaining outcomes.

Contested procedures: Ambiguities, interstices and EU institutional change

This paper applies the framework developed by Farrell and Héritier to disputes over ‘legal bases’ (empowering treaty provisions) and legislative procedures in everyday EU decision-making. Using a variety of data, it largely confirms the power of the Farrell–Héritier framework. Legal bases and procedural political disputes respond to incomplete contracting problems, manifested as the jurisdictional ambiguity of specific policy issues. Parties consistently act as competence maximisers, bargaining interstitially in the pursuit of procedural power. Everyday fights over procedures appear to feed back into subsequent formal institutional (treaty) change. The results support claims of endogenous EU institutional change, while highlighting extensive legal-discursive structuring of this process.

Iceland on the Rocks: The Mass Political Economy of Sovereign Debt Resettlement

We undertake an individual-level analysis of mass political behavior toward sovereign debt resettlement by leveraging the unique circumstances of a 2011 referendum on debt repayment in Iceland. This allows us to engage broader questions about mass international political economy. Against the recent thrust of a growing literature, we find evidence of material economic “pocketbook†effects—self-interest—on voting behavior, operating alongside symbolic/sociotropic and partisan/political logics. Contrary to expectations, these self-interest effects are not conditional on voter sophistication. We conclude that conventional sampling frames may be inappropriate for understanding contemporary democratic contestation over international economic policy.

Domesticating discourses: European law, English judges, and political institutions

We identify two models of the impact of European law on domestic judicial discourses and test them against evidence on the invocation of three EU law concepts within English courts. Contrary to a realist model which expects judicial discourses to correspond closely with direct importations of European law through the preliminary reference procedure, we find stronger support for an indigenization model in which courts gradually domesticate previously alien concepts. These domesticating discourses offer new insights into domestic political and constitutional orders in the context of European and global legalization.