A Study On EU Council’s External Decision Making Mechanism

European Union (EU), which has 28 countries and more than 50 million people, now is the most integrated regional cooperation of states. As an influential power in world politics, much attention has been paid to the activities of EU external policy. This paper deals with EU carrying out what kind of external policy, how and why, focusing on the agenda setting, decision making and policy implementing. Considering the power of the council of EU in legislative politics, any kind of external policy could be carried out only when got approved by the council, so the analysis will stem from the internal operating of EU council. The interaction among Member states’ government, high representative, European parliament and interest group are through this platform, so the council witnesses and participates in the whole process of policy making of EU, and is the institutional heart of EU policy making. From this perspective, the research could avoid the complicated multi-actors, multi-levels and multi-locations problem, and no need to differentiate between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, so only concentrate on the decision-making process can produce more exact conclusion. Therefore, this dissertation aims to analyze EU council, the most powerful legislative institution’s external policy making process, which means, how the actors and factors involved could affect the outcomes of external activities of EU.First of all, this research reviews the existing literature on the council of EU, most attention are paid to the formal interaction model focusing on the policy outcome and process and empirical analysis on the voting records of member states. On this basis, using image models describe describe the influential factors:voting rules, preference divergence, parliament participation, socialization and issue salience, which also constitute the independent variables. After defining and explaining these variables and their relations, this paper propose an explanatory framework and theoretical model for analyzing the collective policy making processes and outcomes in the council, i.e. the institutional realism, which combine the "power" of realism and the "institution" of institutionalism, using concept of "institutional power" interpret how those independent variables affect the inner policy making process of the council of EU; Besides, in order to describe to negotiation processes in the council systematically and comprehend the policy outcomes thoroughly, based on the institutional realism, a compromise model, which could reflect the nest game and consensus policy making, as well as Nash bargaining solution, is employed.Then introduced the research context, including the statistical data and case background in compromised model, which will be applied in the quantitative and qualitative analyses in the followed case study:China policy. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods could guarantee the universality of conclusion by quantitative analysis, preventing accidental results, and through qualitative explanation can uncover whether the theoretical casual relations exist in empirical level, furthermore, by identifying the explanatory factors or casual relations neglected or covered by quantitative research, qualitative analysis helps to elaborate a more complex and scientific theory. With this mutual complement, this paper could develop a challenging framework on how and why the policy making of EU council formulates and works.To look at the EU’s China policy at work, the case study parts adopt China Photovoltaic products anti-dumping and anti-subsidy issues, and the provisions related to China in EU’s "Guidelines on Foreign and Security Policy in East Asia" architecture issued in 2012, through analyzing the China policy making process from quantitative and qualitative perspectives, case studies testify the applicability of theoretical framework and model, which proposed above, both in common trade policy and common foreign and security policy (CFSP) domains, and conclude the extent of influence of each independent variables as well as additional influential factors.Summing up, the external policy making process of EU is characterized by the plurality of in terms of actors, level of political organization and differentiated developments of integration. The explanatory framework proposed here, integrated influential factors in this process in compromised model, its explanatory power and predictive power are confirmed by the quantitative and qualitative analyses.