Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt

• PhD
• Chair at Technical University of Munich

How do Eurosceptic parties position themselves regarding individual European Union (EU) institutions? Using Euromanifesto data from 1979 to 2019, this study addresses this question by disaggregating the attitudes of party families towards separate intergovernmental and supranational EU institutions. It focuses on the relationship between the identi...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a pivotal multilateral institution in global economic governance tasked with ensuring monetary stability and preventing financial crises through promoting balanced trade, economic growth, and poverty reduction. IMF research and expertise also play a powerful normative role in shaping the contours of economic...

In December 2021, the EU member states agreed on the Global Gateway strategy to mobilize public and private funds of up to €300 billion between 2021 and 2027, to invest in digital, climate and energy, transport, health, education, and research fields. With a geographical focus on Africa, Global Gateway links infrastructure investment projects with...

The extensive delegation of power to international organizations (IOs) has been accompanied by occasional agency slack. While prior studies suggest that IOs’ propensity for agency slack may be rooted in their organizational characteristics, this has rarely been explored empirically. To address this lacuna, in this article we propose a conceptualiza...

One key question in the study of the European Union has always been the extent of Commission discretion. We take the discretion index, typically used by principal–agent scholars to measure the Commission's designed discretion, to measure its actual discretion. Commission designed discretion can today be computationally generated with sufficient acc...

Since its inception in 1966, the United Nations Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) has prevailed in the face of significant existential challenges. Against this backdrop, we investigate how and why the JIU persisted over time. Combining delegation and historical institutionalist approaches, we posit that entrepreneurial agents and layering processes toget...

This volume takes stock of international political science research on the various facets of de-globalisation. It follows the volume ‘Globalisation. State of Research and Perspectives’ in our book series ‘International Political Economy’ published by Nomos (Schirm (ed.) 2006). The aim of this volume is to first review the state of international res...

The European Central Bank’s (ECB) role as a political actor during the euro crisis raised concerns about its independence and insufficient accountability. Against this backdrop, the article investigates how and why the ECB reacted to demands for more accountability during and following the crisis. To this end, we revisit the independence-accountabi...

Confronted with a new wave of criticism on the ineffectiveness of its development programs, the World Bank embarked on a revitalization process, turning to private investors to finance International Development Association projects and widening its mandate. To explain these adaptation strategies of the World Bank to regain relevance, this piece dra...

The Lisbon Treaty enhanced the role of the European Parliament in free trade agreements. This article offers a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of this new delegation design in EU trade governance. Specifically, it addresses the question how the preference cohesiveness of multiple principals—the Council of Ministers as a de jure prin...

The past few years have seen an upsurge in populist politics around the globe. Yet, its potential impact on the liberal international order has been analyzed mainly from a discursive perspective, and much less is known about actual policy implications. Adopting an ideational approach to populism and taking the case of the NAFTA renegotiation proces...

Recent discussions of accountability in contexts of expert knowledge raise questions about the limits of transparency. Against this background, we discuss the nexus between expert knowledge and meaningful accountability – that is, context-sensitive accountability based on a genuine understanding of a situation. We argue that the concentration of ex...

Der neue Convoco-Band wirft einen Blick auf auf die aktuellen Konstellationen der Gegenwart. Die globalen Institutionen waren bisher die Grundpfeiler der staatlichen, regelbasierten Zusammenarbeit, sie stehen aber zunehmend unter Druck und sind Schauplätze geopolitischer Auseinandersetzung. Im Gegenzug sehen wir neue Formationen und einen zunehmend...

Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of domestic pressures in determining state preferences toward the reform of international organizations ( IO s). This article adds a new dimension by examining how partisanship and ministerial control affect state preferences toward IO empowerment. The article derives two expectations from the existing li...

During TTIP negotiations, the European Commission was severely criticized by civil society organizations and public opinion for its secrecy regarding negotiation strategies and priorities. The Commission responded by making some negotiating texts publicly available. This article explores the implications of increasing transparency in trade negotiat...

The European Central Bank (ECB) emerged from the sovereign debt crisis as one of the most powerful supranational institutions. Against this background, this article explains how and why the ECB became empowered during the euro area crisis. Building on the delegation, governor’s dilemma, and epistemic community approaches, we argue that the ECB abil...

The international economic system that emerged after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference became the most durable international arrangement devoted to economic openness. Seventy-five years after the conference, however, global shifts in power, institutional gridlock, and populist backlash figure prominently in accounts predicting the system’s demise....

The landscape of multilateral development finance has changed dramatically in the past decades. At Bretton Woods, delegates envisioned the World Bank as the focal organization mobilizing financial support for national development strategies. Today, this issue area is populated by no less than 27 multilateral development banks including the Asian In...

Over the past decade, rising authoritarian regimes have begun to challenge the liberal international order. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the field of multilateral development finance, where China and its coalition partners from Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa have created two new multilateral development banks. This article...

Time plays a central role in international organizations (IOs). Interactions among actors are embedded in a temporal dimension, and actors use formal and informal time rules, time discourses, and time pressure to obtain concessions from their counterparts. By the same token, legacies and innovations within and outside IOs can be examined as a dynam...

Given long‐standing criticism of global economic institutions by rising powers, it is puzzling that these same governments supported the transfer of substantial resources and responsibilities to the IMF and the World Bank during recent reform negotiations. We argue rising powers’ support for international organization (IO) empowerment is linked to...

Over past decades, the World Bank has been criticized by scholars, policymakers, and civil society groups for being unaccountable and inefficient. Confronted with this wave of contestation, the Bank established several internal accountability mechanisms, including the Inspection Panel, the Independent Evaluation Group, and the Compliance Advisor/Om...

The European Parliament is now granted joint powers with the Council of the EU on trade policy issues. In this chapter, I explore how changing the delegation structure that now relies on multiple principals shapes the Commission’s discretion in the negotiation of trade agreements. I argue that an agent’s amount of discretion can be high or low depe...

How do new powers seek to influence global trade governance rules? In this contribution, I posit that, contrary to the EU and the US, which act predominantly as regulatory powers, rising powers use a variety of hard and soft strategies to shape global trade governance. The article finds that a combination of hard strategies, such as coalition-build...

International organizations’ (IOs) power in shaping global governance outcomes is not only determined by the formal delegation of tasks and issue areas but also by the necessary capabilities to fulfill these tasks. Yet, extant research on the delegation of power to IOs gives few insights into the financial and staff capabilities of IOs and focuses...

Whether in multilateral negotiations or bilateral meetings, government leaders regularly engage in “two-level games” played simultaneously at the domestic and the international level. From the two-level-games perspective, executives are seen as “chief negotiators” that are involved in some form of international negotiations for which they ultimatel...

Under which conditions are principals able to regain control when agency slack has occured? While existing research highlights a number of important factors related to the conditions under which agents engage in slack, scholars have to a less extent investigated which causal mechanisms affect the ability of states to regain control of their errant...

Zusammenfassung Mit der Einrichtung der Troika-Institutionen hat die Frage der Kontrollmöglichkeiten und Verschränkung von Macht im EU-Mehrebenensystem an Bedeutung gewonnen. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht dieser Beitrag die Verantwortungszurechnung ( accountability ) der Troika-Institutionen während der Eurokrise. Dabei argumentiere ich, dass D...

The protracted euro area crisis has led to a resurgence of academic interest in integration theories. In a recent piece in this journal, Bauer and Becker argue that the euro crisis allowed the European Commission to strengthen its role in economic governance, in particular with regard to its implementation powers. Contrary to Bauer and Becker’s cla...

Das PVS-Sonderheft nimmt internationale Organisationen als partiell eigenständige Akteure zum Ausgangspunkt, deren Verhalten sich nicht (ausschließlich) aus dem Einfluss von Mitgliedstaaten ableiten lässt, um konzeptionell offen und theorieübergreifend grundlegende Fragen nach Delegation und Autonomie, Verrechtlichung und Politisierung, den interor...

Under what conditions does the internal cohesiveness of the European Union (EU) determine its external effectiveness? In a first step, this introduction probes the frequent assumption that the more cohesive the EU presents itself to the world, the more effective it is in achieving its goals. The empirical contributions to this collection, which ran...

Does the European Union (EU) need to be a cohesive actor internally in order to be effective in global trade governance? And is internal cohesiveness a necessary and sufficient condition for the Union's external effectiveness? Even though these questions are central to explaining the EU's effectiveness, only few studies have dealt with it. In this...

The delegation of decision-making competences to international organizations has led to an intensive debate about their independence and autonomy. In this article, we map patterns of autonomy and show that the way these concepts have been conceptualized and operationalized does not differ as much as we had initially expected. We distinguish four pa...

In the current round of multilateral trade liberalization, emerging powers such as Brazil and India created the G-20 coalition and refused to accept further tariff rate reductions for industrial products before the United States and the European Union made reciprocal concessions in agriculture. This article examines how and why Brazil and India hav...

A large body of literature in international relations has attempted to explain the interaction between domestic politics and International Relations in the field of trade policy. This article provides new critical insight into the literature on two-level games published during the last 25 years and their contribution to the study of international t...

Under the Cardoso presidency (1995–2002), Brazil adopted a reactive and defensive posture on trade liberalization. However, when Lula da Silva came into power in 2003, Brazil took a more offensive and proactive position on the issue in creating the G-20 and putting forward proposals of its own. How can this shift in the Brazilian negotiating positi...

There has been considerable debate about the delegation of power to international organizations, but few studies compare national public administrations with international organizations. In the meantime, international and national bureaucrats are important actors in world politics since they represent states in the international arena. Sometimes ex...

While the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has increased rapidly in recent years, the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations has been deadlocked since 2006. A majority of PTAs was even concluded after the start of the Doha round. Does the shift to PTAs “marginalize” the multilateral system? And is there a clash between preferen...

There has been much debate in the literature about the impact of globalisation on the Australian economy, but few studies focus on the domestic determinants of Australia's negotiating position in international trade negotiations. In order to close this gap, this article analyses the impact of organised interest groups in the Australian trade policy...

During the period leading up to the 2005 WTO Hong Kong ministerial meeting and the 2006 Geneva informal meeting, European Union member states became even more strongly opposed to any further concessions on agricultural issues in the Doha Trade Round. Despite this opposition, the European Commission made a further offer which included concessions on...

Trade between nations is as old as nations themselves, but until the twentieth century it was conducted without interference from international institutions. During the period after the end of the Second World War there was an expansion of international organizations in many different areas, but the plan to establish an International Trade Organiza...

In October 2002, the United States presented a detailed negotiating proposal asking for reductions in domestic support and the total elimination of export subsidies over a five-year period. In the area of market access, the US proposed the use of the Swiss formula that harmonizes tariff levels through substantial tariff reductions, so that tariffs...

On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, in January 2006 trade ministers repeated their intention to conclude the negotiations by the end of the year and to stick to the timetable agreed at Hong Kong. The first stage envisaged the submission by all WTO members of detailed proposals for trade liberalization on agriculture and manufactu...

The literature on US trade policy-making is characterized by a dichotomy between explanations centred on the influence played by interest groups versus those that focus on divided government. Scholars disagree about whether US trade liberalization has been obstructed when different parties hold majority control of Congress and the presidency (divid...

Following the Cancun ministerial meeting in September 2003, little of substance occurred until the USTR Robert Zoellick sent a letter to all WTO members in January 2004 calling for the resumption of negotiations. On agriculture, Zoellick agreed to include cotton, to establish a date to completely eliminate export subsidies, including the abolition...

The aim of this study was to analyse the causes of impasse in international agricultural trade negotiations. In order to explain this puzzle, this study advanced two theoretical claims. First, the rate and scope of concessions at the international level is a function of domestic institutions. Second, the specific outcomes observed in a given multil...

Negotiations on agricultural trade liberalization started formally in March 2000 at the Committee on Agriculture level. WTO members agreed on a timeframe that allowed members to table initial proposals up until the end of December 2000. They also agreed on a schedule of meetings for the first phase of negotiations (World Trade Organization Special...

A large body of literature in international relations has attempted to explain the interaction between domestic politics and international politics in trade policy. Even though Kenneth Waltz (1959) was the first to outline a threefold typology of International Relations theories consisting of individual, domestic, and international-level approaches...

There are few studies dealing with the domestic determinants of Australia’s negotiating position in the Doha round. A majority of scholars focus on the impact of globalization on the Australian political economy (Cotton and Ravenhill, 2001; Kunkel, 2002; Oxley, 2003; Wesley, 2002), or deal with Australian foreign policy in general (Brereton, 2001;...

In multilateral trade negotiations, the EU is represented by the Commission and ‘speaks with one voice’ (Meunier and Nicolaïdis, 1999). This is a unique situation worldwide, and it is almost revolutionary to have a situation where nation states have voluntarily transferred sovereignty to the European level in a key area of external affairs (Meunier...

The Seattle ministerial meeting taking place from 30 November to 3 December 1999 was expected to mark the launch of a new round of multilateral trade negotiations. Trade ministers, however, failed to agree on the negotiating agenda.

In contrast to the United States, there are relatively few studies dealing with the executive-legislative relationship in trade policy in Brazil. Most of the existing studies describe the Brazilian trade policy in the twentieth century (Abreu, 2002; Cervo, 2003; Gabriel, 1999; Marconini, 2005; Silva, 2003; Veiga, 2005) or analyse the executive-legi...

There has been considerable debate about power delegation in EU trade politics, but few studies explore the question of how and why agency losses occur. Focusing on agricultural issues in the Doha Round, this article analyses the impact of agency losses (agency shirking and agency slippage) in the process of power delegation in EU trade politics. A...

This paper addresses the problem of agency losses (agency shirking and agency slippage) in the process of power delegation in EU trade policy. The central question is whether a conflictual situation exists between the interests of the member states and those of the European Commission (agency shirking), or whether the structure of delegation in its...

Although issue linkage is often an important variable in negotiations, it remains an underdeveloped research area in European integration studies. This article attempts to assess the impact of issue linkage on EU bargaining outcomes by applying the Tollison and Willett spatial model of issue linkage to a key bargaining situation in the common fishe...

The French political system tends to produce strong governments backed by stable majorities in parliament. Despite this, even governments with a large parliamentary majority have been reluctant to reform the pension system. This article argues that the degree of difficulty in passing pension legislation depends on the mobilization capacity of trade...

The recent bifurcation of European studies into state-centric and new institutionalist camps has resulted in a sterile theoretical debate that says little about an empirical world where bargaining outcomes cover both member states' preferences and the institutional setting. This article is an attempt to move beyond the theoretical debate. It juxtap...

Despite the distinction made between integrative and distributive bargaining situations in European studies literature, few studies have focused specifically on how these two situations differ. This article attempts to close this gap by examining two key bargaining situations involving fisheries that led to the Europeanization of this policy field....

Auf der Grundlage des akteurzentrierten Institutionalismus präsentiert der vorliegende Beitrag eine theoriegeleitete und empirisch angereicherte Analyse von Verhandlungsergebnissen in der EU am Beispiel der Gemeinsamen Fischereipolitik. Dabei fasst das zugrunde liegende Untersuchungsdesign die Verhandlungsergebnisse als die abhängige, die Präferenz...

On the basis of an actor-centered institutionalist approach, the article provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of bargaining outcomes in the EU utilizing the Common Fisheries Policy as a case study. The research design is quite simple: a set of independent variables (member states' preferences, the European Commission's preferences and...

The recent bifurcation of European studies into state-centric and new institutionalist camps has resulted in a sterile theoretical debate that says little about an empirical world where bargaining outcomes cover both member states' preferences and institutions. This work is an attempt to move beyond the theoretical debate. It elaborates on the gap...