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A Rejoinder to Smiles and Selck: What Small-N Studies on EU Politics May Tell Us about the Questions they Actually Address

In their comment ‘Case Studies and EU Politics: A Reply to Miklin’ (Smiles and Selck 2010), the authors criticise my recent article on the positions of member states (MS) in the Council of the European Union (Miklin 2009). In this article, I take up the debate about the impact of ideological preferences compared to so-called ‘national’ interests and discuss under what conditions ideological preferences are more likely to dominate. Based on a principal– agent model I argue that, when there is a conflict between a minister’s ideological preferences and a country’s ‘national’ interest, the relative impact of the former depends on the relationship between the minister sitting in the Council and the governing parties on the national level: the less a minister is exposed to parliamentary and intra-governmental coordination and control, the more a country’s position is susceptible to the ideological preferences of the minister. This argument is evaluated in a case study on the positions of three countries with regard to the Services Directive. Smiles and Selck claim to have spotted several mistakes, which for them are too profound to be allowed to pass without critique. In the following, I will first address their three points of criticism, which in my view appear to be mainly the result of a misunderstanding regarding the research question the article is actually dealing with. In the last section, I will then address what to me seems to be a second cause for disagreement: a misunderstanding regarding the scope of the claims the article is making and, more generally, about the kind of contribution a small-N study like the one at hand is able to deliver.