“How Supranational is Supranationalism? National and European Socialisation of Negotiators in the Council of Ministers”

The central purpose of this paper is to explain why some officials involved in Council working groups have a more positive disposition towards European integration than others. The paper is inspired by the fact that many studies on European integration deal only occasionally with the attitudes and ideas of the men and women involved in daily negotiations. Consequently most studies employ member-states of European institutions (e.g., the Council, the Commission and the European Parliament) as central units of analysis and the description of European policy-making is therefore often based on a limited number of observations (small n analysis). In this paper we propose to desegregate the Council in multiple observations, the officials involved in the Council working groups. In doing so we hope to obtain a more profound understanding of the Council negotiator’s attitudes. This systematic empirical analysis leads to the conclusion that the interaction between domestic and transgovernmental experiences explains a significant proportion of the variance along the supranational-intergovernmental continuum