A new statecraft? Supranational entrepreneurs and international cooperation

Studies of international regimes, law, and negotiation, as well as regional integration, near universally conclude that informal political leadership by high officials of international organizations-"supranational entrepreneurship"-decisively influences the outcomes of multilateral negotiations. Scholarship on the European Community (EC), in particular, has long emphasized informal agenda setting, mediation, and mobilization by such officials. Yet the research underlying this interdisciplinary consensus tends to be anecdotal, atheoretical, and uncontrolled. The study reported here derives and tests explicit hypotheses from general theories of political entrepreneurship and tests them across multiple cases-the five most important EC negotiations-selected to isolate informal entrepreneurship and control for the parallel actions of national governments. Two findings emerge: First, supranational entrepreneurship in treaty-amending EC decisions is generally redundant or futile, occasionally even counterproductive. Governments can and do almost always efficiently act as their own entrepreneurs. Second, rare cases of entrepreneurial success arise not when officials intervene to help overcome interstate collective action problems, as current theories presume, but when they help overcome domestic (or transnational) collective action problems. This suggests fundamental refinements in core assumptions about the level and source of transaction costs underlying general theories of international regimes, law, and negotiation.