Cooperate or perish? Exploring the bargaining success of the Visegrad Group countries in EU lawmaking

The Visegrad Group (V4) is a regional format of cooperation between four countries, Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, established on 15 February 1991 in the Hungarian town of Visegrad. On 1 May 2004, all V4 states became EU members and, on this occasion, they adopted on 12 May 2004 a declaration in Kroměříž, declaring „their determination to continue developing the cooperation of the Visegrad Group countries as Member States of the European Union” and specifying mechanisms for this cooperation, e.g. „consultation and co-operation of Permanent Representations to the EU” or „intensified communication of V4 national coordinators and their key role in internal and inter-state co-ordination”. Since then, the V4 has been operating within the EU, serving as a tool for developing common positions of the V4 countries on the EU’s activities and legislation. However, despite the long existence of V4 cooperation, little is still known about its effectiveness and profitability in daily EU lawmaking, especially when adopting secondary EU legislation. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna. Its purpose is to empirically examine whether and under what conditions building a coalition between the V4 countries affects their bargaining success in EU lawmaking. Building a coalition is defined here as either working out a common position on EU legislation by the V4 states or approximating their preferences in order to present the closest (though not identical) position. Drawing from the spatial model of decision-making and the theory of coalition-building in the Council, the paper delineates several hypotheses, in particular that: a) The V4 countries are more likely to be successful in legislative negotiations when they form a coalition; b) Building the V4 coalition is beneficial when the V4 countries hold extreme policy positions on EU legislation; c) Building the V4 coalition is beneficial when the V4 countries attach high salience to EU legislation; d) The effect of the V4 coalition on the bargaining success of the V4 countries is greater when their policy position is closer to that of a member state holding the highest voting power, i.e. Germany, France, Italy or the United Kingdom (until 31 January 2020). The above hypotheses are tested using a multi-level linear model on the Decision Making in the EU (DEUIII) dataset, which includes 363 controversial issues relating to 141 politically important EU legislative proposals introduced and decided between 1996 and 2019 (Arregui and Perarnaud 2022). The paper uses several dependent variables that capture the bargaining success of all and individual V4 countries as the absolute distance between their initial policy positions and decision outcomes on a legislative issue. It is assumed that a state enjoys greater bargaining success if the final outcome is closer to its initial preference. The analysis also includes several control variables relating to, inter alia, the proximity of the V4 countries to the status quo and the policy positions of the European Parliament and the European Commission, policy area, legislative instrument and legislative procedure.