Referendums and Ratification of the EU Constitution

Abstract

Compared with previous treaty ratifications, the proposed constitution for the European Union (EU) has triggered an unprecedented number of referen-dums. Overall, citizens in ten EU member countries were scheduled to express their view on the EU constitution. Two of these referendums resulted, however, in negative outcomes, namely the ones in France and the Netherlands. This put a rather abrupt stop to the ratification process for this new treaty. This possibility of “involuntary defections” (e.g., Schelling 1960, Putnam 1988, Iida 1996) may - according to several theoretical mod-els relying on two-level games - have affected the bargaining which took place at the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) called to adopt the final version of the EU constitution. As an additional constraint on ratification, referendums may have strengthened the bargaining position of some negotiators, according to Schelling’s (1960) “paradox of weakness”. For this to occur, however, referendums must have been perceived as a credible op-tion for the ratification process during the negotiations, and they needed to add an additional hurdle to ratification. In this paper we propose initial systematic tests of this proposition for the negotiations which led up to the adoption of the EU constitution at the June 2004 IGC.

This paper emanates from the DOSEI (Domestic Structures and European Integration) project funded by the European Union in its Fifth Framework program and directed by Thomas König (Universität Speyer). An earlier version was presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Granada, Spain; 14–19 April, 2005. We gratefully acknowledge the able research assistance of Barbara Gähwiler and Annika Raudonat, as well as the financial support of the Swiss Bundesamt für Bildung und Wissenschaft (Grant number BBW Nr 02.0313) and the Grundlagenforschungsfonds of the University of St. Gallen (Grant number G12161103).