“Administrative Rivalry in the Council’s Infrastructure: Diagnosing the Methods of Community in EU Decision-Making”

I have organized this paper into two main sections. In the first I will summarize the main empirical findings from a research project on Coreper’s role in EU decision-making. Drawing from a series of empirical case studies, I present evidence which supports the existence of a distinct bargaining style in Coreper. In the second, I will extend these findings to a more tentative set of comparisons with the other preparatory bodies within the Council’s infrastructure. This comparison will reveal that the Council’s administrative infrastructure contains a fairly robust level of intra- and interadministrative rivalry-and that of the other EU committees, only the Economic and Finance Committee (formerly the Monetary Committee) approximates the dense norms of interaction, thick trust, and culture of compromise found in Coreper. In a nutshell, this paper is designed to extend a series of findings on Coreper to broader generalizations about decision-making styles in the Council and how different preparatory bodies cooperate and compete in this system.