Multi-level Governance And Institutional Rational: The Eu's Common Trade Policy Decision-making Research

As a muliti-level governance polity which differs from sovreign states and normal inter-governmental organizations, the most prominent feature of the European Union's policy-making is related to its complex institutional settings and their impact on the decision-making process. Thus, EU policy-making not only involves an "action process", but also a "social structure", which needs a multi-dimensional angle to investigate, especially with reference to Comparative Politics and Public Administration theories and methodologies. In this thesis, I take the EU's Common Commercial Policy as research subject and try to make theoretical reflections based upon the EU's institutional settings and decision-making theories.I try to raise a concept of "Institutional Rationality", after carefully studying three main EU decision-making theories: Neo-Institutionalism fom the IR tradition; Institutionalism tradition from Comparative Politics - Rational Choice Institutionalism, Sociological Institutionalism and Historical Institutionalism; and a enhanced Institutionalism with the Power parameter incorporated, namely Institutional Realism. This notion of "Institutional Rationality" is described as "the rational interaction between actors and institutions affects the decision-making process and determines the policy outcome". In "Institutional Rationality", Rationality is the core (externalized as actors' references - "scale" and "intensity"), while Institutions are conditions, backgrounds and context. It broardens the concept of "institution" , and emphasizes the role of "informal institutions" in shaping actors behavior in EU decison-making process. At the same time, as in real politics it is not appropriate to neglect the power relations in which the institutions operate or the power parameter under the institutional framework, I will take "Issue salience " (the "intensity" of an actor's preference) as one source of actors' endogenous power when taking part in EU collective decision-making. "Issue salience" is supposed to be the factor shaping and detemining the national legitimacy for EU policy outcome, which decides the maneuvre room for EU member states in EU decision-making. For this reason, I take "Issue salience" as a key variable in the Instituional Rationality framework.After building up the theoretical framework, I go on with a chapter on the decision-making system of the EU's Common Commercial Policy, after which I will present two case studies respectively on EU participation in negotiations of the GATT Uruguay Round and the WTO Basic Communications Service Agreement in order to test the theoretical assumptions.