Paper Titles & Abstracts

An important question that keeps haunting the study of the EU's external trade policies focuses on the relative influence of the Commission and the member states in such negotiations. Principal-Agent theory has been used as a theoretical framework against which these questions have been analysed. Several studies have tried to identify the conditions under which either the principals or the agent prevail in EU trade negotiations. Because of the labour-intensity of qualitative empirical research that focuses on this question, not a lot of comparative research is available here. This paper aims at providing such research with a focus on Commission-member state interactions in negotiations on free trade agreements. Renewed activism of the EU on such FTAs allows us to analyse a wide range of quantitative data with respect to tariff barriers in such agreements and to link them with economic and institutional data at the EU and member state level. Despite the limits of the data (i.e. because it focuses on tariff barriers for goods only), such an endeavour may enable us to increase the number of cases on which to rely our observations with respect to principal-agent dynamics in trade negotiations inside the EU and to move the theoretical debate on such dynamics forward.