ABSTRACT
How can a national government influence the making of European Union (EU) policies? This question is central to this study. The majority of rules and legislation annually issued by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament is binding for national governments. Key to understanding the intricate relation between the national and the EU level are the legal principles of supremacy and direct effect of EU law. 1 As European decisions directly impact on the member states, governments have a strong interest to minimize the constitutional, legal, administrative and financial costs related to their implementation or ‘taking’ (Börzel 2003). Their representatives are very active in the process of formulating and ‘uploading’ certain preferences about their contents and form to the EU level. But national politicians and officials are not the only stakeholders active in this process of ‘shaping’ new EU policies. With the growing salience of European policies and politics, a plethora of public and non-state actors has become actively involved in this process. Within the academic field of EU studies, this has inspired new thinking about the nature and mechanisms of the interaction between the governments of the member states and the EU. 2 Although the ‘Europeanisation’ of national governments has been the subject of extensive research projects since the early 1990s, the variables relevant for a national government’s shaping capacity have remained seriously understudied.
