Divergent Interests, Different Success Rates: France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom in EU Legislative Negotiations

In this paper, we evaluate the relative success rates of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom in the area of European Union legislative decision-making. We present a research design that encompasses data on the policy profiles of these four EU member states for 70 European legal acts that were recently negotiated. We find that, among the four countries, the policy outcome on the European level is most closely related to the British position. Moreover, the results show that the preferences of the UK and Germany are more closely related to each other than the preferences of France and Germany. We detect a ‘north versus south’ coalition pattern rather than the existence of a ‘Franco-German axis’