European integration as a process that unfolds over time, and the conditions under which path-dependent processes are most likely to occur. Working from essentially rationalist assumptions, Pierson argues that, despite the initial primacy of member governments in the design of EU institutions and policies, ‘gaps’ may occur in the ability of member governments to control the subsequent development of institutions and policies, for four reasons. First, member governments in democratic societies may, because of electoral concerns, apply a high ‘discount rate’ to the future, agreeing to EU policies that lead to a long-term loss of national control in return for short-term electoral returns. Secondly, even when governments do not heavily discount the future, unintended consequences of institutional choices can create additional gaps, which member governments may or may not be able to close through subsequent action. Thirdly, the preferences of member governments are likely to change over time, most obviously because of electoral turnover, leaving new governments with new preferences to inherit an acquis communautaire negotiated by, and according to the preferences of, a previous government. Given the frequent requirement of unanimous voting (or the high hurdle of QMV) to overturn past institutional and policy choices, individual member governments are likely to find themselves ‘immobilized by the weight of past initiatives’ (Pierson 1996 b: 137). Finally, EU institutions and policies can become locked-in not only as a result of change-resistant institutions from above, but also through the incremental growth of entrenched support for existing institutions from below, as societal actors adapt to and develop a vested interest in the continuation of specific EU policies. In the area of social policy, for example, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has developed jurisprudence on issues such as gender equity and workplace health and safety that certainly exceeded the initial expectations of the member states; yet these decisions have proven difficult to roll back, both because of the need for unanimous agreement to overturn ECJ decisions and because domestic constituencies have developed a vested interest in their continued application.
At their best, historical institutionalist analyses offer not only the banal observation that institutions are ‘sticky’, but also a tool kit for predicting and explaining under what conditions we should expect institutional lock-ins and path-dependent behaviour.
More specifically, we should expect that, ceteris paribus, institutions and policies will be most resistant to change: where their alteration requires a unanimous agreement among member states, or the consent of supranational actors like the Commission or the Parliament; and where existing EU policies mobilize cross-national bases of support that raise the cost of reversing or significantly revising them. Both factors vary across issue areas, and we should therefore expect variation in the stability and path-dependent character of EU institutions and policies. To take one example, the EU structural funds might at first glance seem to be an ideal candidate for path-dependent behaviour, much like the CAP. By contrast with the CAP, however, the structural funds must be reauthorized at periodic intervals by a unanimous agreement among the member states, giving recalcitrant states periodic opportunities to veto their continuation.
Furthermore, because the structural funds are explicitly framed as redistributive transferring money from rich states and regions to poor ones, we see an uneven pattern of reliance upon and support for the structural funds among member states and their citizens. The practical upshot of these differences is that EU governments have been able to reform the structural funds more readily, and with less incidence of path-dependence, than we find in the CAP, which has indeed resisted all but the most incremental change (see Chapters 7 and 9).
In sum, for both rational-choice and historical institutionalists, EU institutions ‘matter’, shaping both the policy process and policy outcomes in predictable ways, and indeed shaping the long-term process of European integration. In both cases, however, the effects of EU institutions are assumed to influence only the incentives confronting the various public and private actors-the actors themselves are assumed to remain unchanged in their fundamental preferences and identities. Indeed, despite their differences on substantive issues, liberal intergovernmentalism, rational-choice institutionalism, and most historical institutionalism arguably constitute a shared rationalist research agenda-a community of scholars operating from similar basic assumptions and seeking to test hypotheses about the most important determinants of European integration.