The European Union (EU) faces considerable challenges in developing efficient institutions to integrate preferences of many state and substate units for decisions ranging from constitutional to minor policy decisions. Existing approaches tend to focus exclusively on the formal allocation of power, thereby completely neglecting the informal forces at work in decision-making processes. In this chapter I argue that the informal, self-organizing administrative networks already developed within the formal framework of European Union decision making provide a natural model for designing more effective and efficient decision frameworks for negotiations during intergovernmental conferences dealing with constitutional treaty-making. I first analyze the institutional collective action (ICA) problems encountered by the existing formal negotiating structures in terms of the collective action problems they imply. I then demonstrate how existing administrative networks can be identified on both the national and the EU level, and argue that these networks could provide the basis for selecting negotiation teams and creating better decision structures. The analysis focuses on the EU, but the basic argument applies in metropolitan, regional, national, or supernational settings whenever existing units of government facing horizontal ICA problems attempt to negotiate a constitution to resolve them.

ICA AND THE SECOND-ORDER FREE-RIDER PROBLEM IN CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: THE EUROPEAN UNION

The European Union is a hybrid multi-tiered political system with marked problems of fragmentation of authority and extensive ICA problems.