Tim Büthe
Current and recent research project and papers
on European integration and the EU
An important line of
my research deals with the European Union (EU) and the process of European integration.
One overarching theoretical concern of this research has been to develop what
I call a re-statement of neofunctionalism, building on the early work of scholars
of European integration, in particular Ernst Haas, but also on insights from
more recent, general theoretical work in the rationalist as well as the constructivist
tradition. The primary objective of this work is to spell out the micro-foundations
of neofunctionalism and work out the causal mechanisms that have remained underspecified
in much of the earlier literature. Empirically, I am especially interested
in public perceptions of European integration and in the process of institutional
change in the EU. I also follow current developments in European/EU politics
closely and have discussed for instance the implications of the French and Dutch
rejection of the EU "Constitution" for the Duke
News Service and National
Public Radio's Public Affairs Hour (produced by KPCW, Park City,
Utah, 6/6/2005). See also my Fall 2005 review of John Gillingham's European Integration, 1950-2003 in the Journal of Cold War Studies.
Public Opinion and European Integration
How do citizens of current and potential future EU member states view the European Union and the process of European integration? Is the EU, in the eyes of citizen-voters just a free trade zone, a means for economic policy coordination, or even a clearly political institution? And can we understand public perceptions of the EU in terms of the broader theories of European integration? I have explored these questions in a series of papers, focusing empirically on the public debate and referendum over EU membership in Austria in 1994.
This paper presents my
initial exploration of public perceptions of EU membership theoretically and
empirically, based on a content analysis of the public debate over whether or
not to join the EU, in the run-up to the Austrian referendum of 1994 and a statistical
analysis of district-level referendum results. The empirical analysis
is documented here in far greater detail than in the later papers that draw
on the Austrian referendum data.
The Domestic Politics of European Integration: Public Opinion, Referenda, and EU Membership. (with Mark Copelovitch and William Phelan) Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, March 2002. <download paper text> <download figures>
Integrating insights from
realist intergovernmentalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, neofunctionalism,
comparative and international political economy, this paper develops a general
deductive model of public perceptions of EU membership that grounds the study
of this issue more firmly in the general theoretical literatures on European
integration and public opinion. We specify this general model inductively
for the Austrian referendum on EU membership in 1994, based on a qualitative
analysis of the public debate preceding the referendum. We then test the
model quantitatively using several statistical techniques to analyze the referendum
results: OLS regression of data from Austria's 121 political administrative
districts to estimate effects for low-level aggregates of EU citizens-to-be
and Gary King's maximum likelihood-based ecological inference technique to estimate
individual-level effects. Consistent with the general model, we find that
highly political considerations—especially the potential for transnational
coalition building through EU institutions—were important determinants
of the variation in support for EU membership within the country, along with
aggregate and individual-level economic considerations. This paper
goes beyond the 1995 working paper by offering a theoretical discussion that
is more self-consciously grounded in the larger theoretical debates over European
integration and by adding, thanks to cooperation with Mark Copelovitch and Will
Phelan, an ecological inference analysis to the statistical section.
Institutional Change & EU Competition Policy
In the 50 years since the beginning
of the negotiations at Messina, at the end of which six West European countries
barely agreed to a general customs union under the name European Economic Community,
the European Union (as it is now known) has become one of the most important
institutions in the international political economy and world politics. It not only provides a structure within which
national governments and transnational interests interact, but in some issue
areas, the EC/EU has become an important actor in its own right, with genuinely
supranational powers. What explains this phenomenal institutional change?
I analyze EU institutional change in the realm of competition policy--specifically in antitrust enforcement, merger review, and regulation of "state aids" (government subsidies/assistance to firms)--where
the EU has been transformed from an ineffective, marginal actor to one of the
most crucial players in the international political economy.
Antitrust regulation and the related merger review are essential in making a market economy work. Merger control is among the most prominent powers of the European Commission in the Common Market of the EU. How did this supranational actor come to acquire such power in this realm? And what explains the variation in DG Competition's decisions in some of the trans-atlantically most controversial merger review cases in recent years? In this paper, we develop a modified neofunctionalist theory and argue that it provides a superior explanation of (1) the institutional development of the European Commission's competence in antitrust and merger review matters from the 1950s negotiations over the Treaty of Rome through the changes of 2004 and (2) DG Competition's decisions in some of the most prominent cases, where a high level of politicization makes a neofunctionalist explanation least likely.
This chapter broadens the historical institutionalist analysis of the paper on merger review to the entire portfolio of EU "Competition" policy. In this chapter, I briefly introduce my slightly modified neofunctionalist theory, understood as a historical institutionalist theory of institutional change, focusing on the hypothesized causal mechanisms that emphasize sub- and trans-national actors pushing for greater integration in pursuit of their own, selfish interests. I then sketch the institutional evolution of EU competition authority in antitrust enforcement, merger review/control, and state aids (subsidies) from the provisions in the Treaty of Paris through the most recent developments. I show that a slightly modified neofunctionalism can explain institutional change over time--better and more fully than alternative theoretical approaches--as well as the variation across the issue areas of competition policy.
< page last updated 28 November 2006>