Markus Gastinger

University of Salzburg · Division of Political Science

Which issues does the Commission focus on in the negotiation of bilateral trade agreements? How (to what extent) autonomous is the Commission, which sources and causal mechanisms bring this autonomy to bear, and have these sources changed over time? Which is the most effective mechanism of control available to member states in the Council to rein i...

We argue that one prime source of Commission autonomy in bilateral trade negotiations was the informational advantage that it acquired during the pre-negotiations, which is the phase preceding the adoption of negotiating directives by the Council. Initially, the Commission was entirely unmonitored owing to the lack of Treaty provisions applying to...

How to efficiently teach in an increasingly complex field like European Studies is subject to a burgeoning literature. At the same time, the use of simulations to convey fundamental concepts and theories at an undergraduate level is catching on particularly in international relations (IR). To complement more traditional forms of teaching at Higher...

How can we measure and explain the precision of international organizations’ (IOs) founding treaties? We define precision by its negative – imprecision – as indeterminate language that intentionally leaves a wide margin of interpretation for actors after agreements enter into force. Compiling a “dictionary of imprecision” from almost 500 scholarly...

Many international agreements of the European Union establish what we call joint bodies (JBs). Examples of such bodies include joint committees, joint sub-committees, and association and cooperation councils. Over the years, the EU has built an impressive global web of JBs, which bring together EU and third-country executive officials and play a ke...

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...

In many international agreements, the European Union (EU) sets up joint bodies (JBs) such as "association councils" or "joint committees." These JBs bring together EU and third-country officials for agreement implementation. To date, we know surprisingly little about the degree of discretion the European Commission enjoys in them. Drawing on a prin...

Which member states could leave the European Union in the years ahead? To answer this question, I develop the ‘EU Exit Index’ measuring the exit propensities of all European Union member states. The index highlights that the United Kingdom was an outlier and uniquely positioned to leave the European Union. While all other states are far behind the...

How much discretion does the Commission enjoy in the European Union? To address this question, we draw on principal–agent theory and propose ‘interest in a decision’ by principals as a proxy for agent discretion. This has three advantages over existing approaches. First, it overcomes the high‐conflict bias of case studies. Second, it accounts for t...

This chapter argues that conceiving the Commission as a unitary actor is a legitimate simplification of empirical reality for most research purposes. Recently, the principal–agent literature has started examining collective-actor features of agents and suggested that internal conflict is as disadvantageous to agents as it is to principals. By contr...

The use of simulations in higher education teaching is burgeoning in political science curricula, particularly in international relations and European Union studies. This article contends that most simulations suffer from complexity bias and put too much emphasis on substantive knowledge. Drawing on the author’s experience, two ideal types of simul...

Am 12. Juni 2008 sprachen sich im bislang einzigen Referendum zum Vertrag von Lissabon in Irland 46,6 Prozent für und 53,4 Prozent gegen die Ratifikation aus. Da die Umfrageforschung reichhaltiges, aber auch widersprüchliches Material zur Analyse der Beweggründe für das Nein liefert, stützt sich diese Studie auf ein eigenständig erhobenes Datenset...

Available at http://www.swp-berlin.org/fileadmin/contents/products/fachpublikationen/GWP_KS_4_2008_Parkes.pdf (accessed September 2015).