Dirk De Bièvre
Biographic Data
| ID | 4375033 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dirk De Bièvre |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dirk |
| FAMILY NAME | De Bièvre |
| SIGNATURE | DE BIÈVRE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Antwerp |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3030-6492 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 500 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Bootleggers, Baptists, and Policymakers: Domestic Discourse Coalitions in EU–Mercosur Negotiations
This article examines the dynamics of coalition formation in the context of the EU–Mercosur negotiations, utilizing the “Bootleggers and Baptists” analogy to understand how diverse actors—such as import‐competing sectors, civil society organizations, and policymakers—engage in issue‐linkage in public debates surrounding preferential trade agreement negotiations. The framework explores three types of coalition formation: opportunistic framing, str…
Studying the influence of interest groups on non-decisionmaking: Challenges and tools in research design
The political science literature has extensively analyzed the political influence of interest groups in recent years. Despite growing scholarly interest into their role in agenda-setting, a significant blind spot remains in understanding their control over non-decisionmaking. This lack of insight into interest groups’ negative agenda-setting influence is primarily due to three fundamental challenges in research design: conceptualization, sampling…
Balancing security and economics: Domestic state-firm relations and investment screening mechanisms in Europe
In an era of intense geopolitical competition, concerns about the impact of foreign investments in strategic sectors of the European economy have led policymakers to review European investment screening mechanisms (ISMs). In doing so, European institutions and member states have to find a balance between security and economics, maintaining a favorable environment for potential investors while simultaneously protecting specific sectors that they d…
Reacting to the politicization of trade policy
How do actors react to the politicisation of trade policy? This special issue aims to tackle this question, considering a broad set of actors including members of parliament, political parties, regional and national governments, interest groups, and the European Commission. To set the stage for the contributions to the special issue, in this introduction, we first conceptualise politicisation as the combination of high salience and high contestat…
Time for a New Atlanticism: The EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment and the International Order
There has been no shortage of critiques of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) signed on 30 December 2020. Many have perceived the CAI as a snub in the face of the Biden administration, which has the potential to jeopardise one of the most important strategic goals of the transatlantic alliance: setting aside four years of Trump’s populist economic policy and working in close coordination with a view to developing a united fr…
Multilateralism, Bilateralism and Institutional Choice: The Political Economy of Regime Complexes in International Trade Policy
The global trading regime is characterized by the co‐existence of bilateral and multilateral politics. In this article, we offer a political economy explanation for this regime complex, by tracing public actors’ institutional choices back to political incentives for economic sectors and the firms active within them. First, we argue that product differentiation creates mixed motives on the part of firms, which in turn leads to a preference for the…
The European Union and the political economy of enforcing international trade rules
The European Commission keeps track of foreign trade barriers through its Market Access Strategy. In this study, we examine some of the key political-economic conditions under which the European Union decides whether and how to address these trade issues. Drawing on an original dataset of (allegedly) illegal foreign trade barriers faced by European Union businesses, we show that industries dominated by a few large companies are more successful in…
Seizing the moment: Regional opportunity structures and Wallonia’s temporary veto of the EU–Canada bilateral trade agreement
Constitutionally, Belgium represents the most extreme case of regional entities wielding power over EU external trade policymaking. Formally, the Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regions can wield veto power over Belgian positions. Yet, only once has a Belgian region actually made use of this capacity, when Wallonia temporarily blocked the conclusion of the EU trade agreement with Canada in 2016 (CETA). We show that political actors – legislative an…
Principals and transceivers: Regional authorities in EU trade negotiations
The EU conducts its external trade policy under close scrutiny by member-states. Yet, what about the role of regional authorities in federal states? To answer, we look at the principal-agent chain of delegation and explore to which extent regions with stakes and competencies in the matter exert control over EU policies. We distinguish three ideal-type roles regions can perform: principals in their own right, members of collective principals, and …
Towards Explaining Varying Degrees of Politicization of EU Trade Agreement Negotiations
Over the last decade, European Union (EU) trade agreement negotiations in the form of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada have been strongly contested. By contrast, many other EU trade negotiations have sailed on with far less politicization, or barely any at all. In this contribution, we assess a series of plausible explanation for these very varying degr…
Patterns of Conflict and Mobilization: Mapping Interest Group Activity in EU Legislative Policymaking
Contemporary studies on interest group politics have mainly used single interest organizations as their central objects of study. This has led to a rich body of knowledge on the motivations of interest group mobilization, strategy development and even policy access and influence. The focus on single interest groups, however, has resulted in limited knowledge on aggregate patterns of interest groups’ activity. This article seeks to address this la…
Trade, Political Coalitions and Neo-Gothic Architecture
Why did English lords build Gothic ruins, Flemish textile barons recreate medieval cities, and the Prussian elites restore castles
No iceberg in sight: On the absence of WTO disputes challenging fossil fuel subsidies
Why the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is not (so) new, and why it is also not (so) bad
De Ville and Siles-Brügge (2016) argue that the politics of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations are entirely new and that it will lead to 'regulatory chill'. We think these two statements are untenable from a logical and empirical standpoint. While distributive political conflict is relatively absent because of firms' integration into global value chains, civil society organizations voice value-based opposition …
WTO Judicial Politics and EU Trade Policy: Business Associations as Vessels of Special Interest
This article: Contributes to the literature on interest groups showing how the interplay of domestic and international institutional structures critically affects the character of lobbying. Contributes to a better understanding of EU trade politics, highlighting how such processes are systematically affected by changes in global governance structures. Traces empirically how important institutional innovations were introduced in EU trade policy ma…
The Domestic and Global Origins of Transnational Advocacy: Explaining Lobbying Presence During WTO Ministerial Conferences
This article explains varying levels of transnational advocacy initiated by domestic organized interests. Theoretically, we integrate the constraining and enabling impact of the domestic context with factors related to global opportunity structures. We test our hypotheses with an original data set consisting of all national organized interests that attended the Ministerial Conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the period 1995 throu…
The political science of European trade policy: A literature review with a research outlook
Political mobilization, veto players, and WTO litigation: Explaining European Union responses in trade disputes
Given the increasing relevance of judicial politics in the WTO, the relative scholarly neglect of EU performance in WTO litigation stands out as a surprising gap in the literature. With this article we contribute towards filling this gap. We do so by teasing out the conceptual distinction between dispute escalation and dispute outcome and by making plausible how the former may be caused by strong political mobilization and the latter by a high nu…
To enforce or not to enforce? Judicialization, venue shopping, and global regulatory harmonization
The regulation of intellectual property rights takes place in a range of international venues. This proliferation of international venues greatly enhances the potential for venue shopping. We argue that different levels of domestic regulation and differing degrees of judicialization account for actors' preferences over institutional venues. We take into consideration two scenarios. Conceiving of judicialization as the delegation of adjudication t…
Interest groups and EU anti-dumping policy
Why did the European Union (EU) attempt yet fail to reform its anti-dumping legislation between 2006 and 2008? We analyse this attempt to reform a legislative act regulating interest groups' access to public decision-makers by relying on collective action and principal – agent theory. Contrary to approaches assuming that the European Commission enjoys a large degree of agent autonomy to implement a more liberal EU trade policy than most member st…
Inclusion without Influence? NGOs in European Trade Policy
The actions of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with such issues as development, human rights, and the protection of the environment voicing concerns to public authorities raises the questions: Do these newly mobilised societal actors influence EU trade policy outcomes? We answer in the negative, arguing that such groups, which have diffuse costs and benefits from trade policies, do not dispose of resources with which they can threa…
The Question of Interest Group Influence
Interest groups are a major channel through which citizens can express their opinions to decision-makers. Their participation in policymaking may improve decision-making processes by supporting policies that are in line with citizen preferences and blocking policies that solely reflect the interests of the governing elite. At the same time, however, intense interest group pressures may make it difficult for policy-makers to implement the most eff…
The EU regulatory trade agenda and the quest for WTO enforcement
The European Union (EU) has increasingly called for regulatory agreements in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in areas such as investment, competition, environment, and labour. Why has the EU attempted to satisfy such new demands by pursuing regulatory goals within the WTO rather than within other international organizations? I suggest two reasons for the EU's choice of the WTO. First, the nature of issue linkage in international trade negotiat…
Constituency Interests and Delegation in European and American Trade Policy
Trade policy in the EU and the United States is to a large extent delegated to executive agents. Existing explanations claim that legislators delegate because they wish to liberalize but are unable to achieve this on their own. The authors show that legislators delegate powers to obtain foreign market access for exporters and protection for import-competing interests. Confronted with heterogeneousdemands from both groups, principals delegate to t…
The Question of Interest Group Influence
Interest groups are a major channel through which citizens can express their opinions to decision-makers. Their participation in policymaking may improve decision-making processes by supporting policies that are in line with citizen preferences and blocking policies that solely reflect the interests of the governing elite. At the same time, however, intense interest group pressures may make it difficult for policy-makers to implement the most eff…
Inclusion without Influence? NGOs in European Trade Policy
The actions of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with such issues as development, human rights, and the protection of the environment voicing concerns to public authorities raises the questions: Do these newly mobilised societal actors influence EU trade policy outcomes? We answer in the negative, arguing that such groups, which have diffuse costs and benefits from trade policies, do not dispose of resources with which they can threa…
Constituency Interests and Delegation in European and American Trade Policy
Trade policy in the EU and the United States is to a large extent delegated to executive agents. Existing explanations claim that legislators delegate because they wish to liberalize but are unable to achieve this on their own. The authors show that legislators delegate powers to obtain foreign market access for exporters and protection for import-competing interests. Confronted with heterogeneousdemands from both groups, principals delegate to t…
Reacting to the politicization of trade policy
How do actors react to the politicisation of trade policy? This special issue aims to tackle this question, considering a broad set of actors including members of parliament, political parties, regional and national governments, interest groups, and the European Commission. To set the stage for the contributions to the special issue, in this introduction, we first conceptualise politicisation as the combination of high salience and high contestat…
Towards Explaining Varying Degrees of Politicization of EU Trade Agreement Negotiations
Over the last decade, European Union (EU) trade agreement negotiations in the form of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada have been strongly contested. By contrast, many other EU trade negotiations have sailed on with far less politicization, or barely any at all. In this contribution, we assess a series of plausible explanation for these very varying degr…
Why the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is not (so) new, and why it is also not (so) bad
De Ville and Siles-Brügge (2016) argue that the politics of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations are entirely new and that it will lead to 'regulatory chill'. We think these two statements are untenable from a logical and empirical standpoint. While distributive political conflict is relatively absent because of firms' integration into global value chains, civil society organizations voice value-based opposition …
The Domestic and Global Origins of Transnational Advocacy: Explaining Lobbying Presence During WTO Ministerial Conferences
This article explains varying levels of transnational advocacy initiated by domestic organized interests. Theoretically, we integrate the constraining and enabling impact of the domestic context with factors related to global opportunity structures. We test our hypotheses with an original data set consisting of all national organized interests that attended the Ministerial Conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the period 1995 throu…
The EU regulatory trade agenda and the quest for WTO enforcement
The European Union (EU) has increasingly called for regulatory agreements in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in areas such as investment, competition, environment, and labour. Why has the EU attempted to satisfy such new demands by pursuing regulatory goals within the WTO rather than within other international organizations? I suggest two reasons for the EU's choice of the WTO. First, the nature of issue linkage in international trade negotiat…
Political mobilization, veto players, and WTO litigation: Explaining European Union responses in trade disputes
Given the increasing relevance of judicial politics in the WTO, the relative scholarly neglect of EU performance in WTO litigation stands out as a surprising gap in the literature. With this article we contribute towards filling this gap. We do so by teasing out the conceptual distinction between dispute escalation and dispute outcome and by making plausible how the former may be caused by strong political mobilization and the latter by a high nu…
To enforce or not to enforce? Judicialization, venue shopping, and global regulatory harmonization
The regulation of intellectual property rights takes place in a range of international venues. This proliferation of international venues greatly enhances the potential for venue shopping. We argue that different levels of domestic regulation and differing degrees of judicialization account for actors' preferences over institutional venues. We take into consideration two scenarios. Conceiving of judicialization as the delegation of adjudication t…
Seizing the moment: Regional opportunity structures and Wallonia’s temporary veto of the EU–Canada bilateral trade agreement
Constitutionally, Belgium represents the most extreme case of regional entities wielding power over EU external trade policymaking. Formally, the Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regions can wield veto power over Belgian positions. Yet, only once has a Belgian region actually made use of this capacity, when Wallonia temporarily blocked the conclusion of the EU trade agreement with Canada in 2016 (CETA). We show that political actors – legislative an…
Patterns of Conflict and Mobilization: Mapping Interest Group Activity in EU Legislative Policymaking
Contemporary studies on interest group politics have mainly used single interest organizations as their central objects of study. This has led to a rich body of knowledge on the motivations of interest group mobilization, strategy development and even policy access and influence. The focus on single interest groups, however, has resulted in limited knowledge on aggregate patterns of interest groups’ activity. This article seeks to address this la…
Interest groups and EU anti-dumping policy
Why did the European Union (EU) attempt yet fail to reform its anti-dumping legislation between 2006 and 2008? We analyse this attempt to reform a legislative act regulating interest groups' access to public decision-makers by relying on collective action and principal – agent theory. Contrary to approaches assuming that the European Commission enjoys a large degree of agent autonomy to implement a more liberal EU trade policy than most member st…
WTO Judicial Politics and EU Trade Policy: Business Associations as Vessels of Special Interest
This article: Contributes to the literature on interest groups showing how the interplay of domestic and international institutional structures critically affects the character of lobbying. Contributes to a better understanding of EU trade politics, highlighting how such processes are systematically affected by changes in global governance structures. Traces empirically how important institutional innovations were introduced in EU trade policy ma…
No iceberg in sight: On the absence of WTO disputes challenging fossil fuel subsidies
Balancing security and economics: Domestic state-firm relations and investment screening mechanisms in Europe
In an era of intense geopolitical competition, concerns about the impact of foreign investments in strategic sectors of the European economy have led policymakers to review European investment screening mechanisms (ISMs). In doing so, European institutions and member states have to find a balance between security and economics, maintaining a favorable environment for potential investors while simultaneously protecting specific sectors that they d…
Constituency Interests and Delegation in European and American Trade Policy
Trade policy in the EU and the United States is to a large extent delegated to executive agents. Existing explanations claim that legislators delegate because they wish to liberalize but are unable to achieve this on their own. The authors show that legislators delegate powers to obtain foreign market access for exporters and protection for import-competing interests. Confronted with heterogeneousdemands from both groups, principals delegate to t…
The EU regulatory trade agenda and the quest for WTO enforcement
The European Union (EU) has increasingly called for regulatory agreements in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in areas such as investment, competition, environment, and labour. Why has the EU attempted to satisfy such new demands by pursuing regulatory goals within the WTO rather than within other international organizations? I suggest two reasons for the EU's choice of the WTO. First, the nature of issue linkage in international trade negotiat…
Inclusion without Influence? NGOs in European Trade Policy
The actions of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with such issues as development, human rights, and the protection of the environment voicing concerns to public authorities raises the questions: Do these newly mobilised societal actors influence EU trade policy outcomes? We answer in the negative, arguing that such groups, which have diffuse costs and benefits from trade policies, do not dispose of resources with which they can threa…
The Question of Interest Group Influence
Interest groups are a major channel through which citizens can express their opinions to decision-makers. Their participation in policymaking may improve decision-making processes by supporting policies that are in line with citizen preferences and blocking policies that solely reflect the interests of the governing elite. At the same time, however, intense interest group pressures may make it difficult for policy-makers to implement the most eff…
Interest groups and EU anti-dumping policy
Why did the European Union (EU) attempt yet fail to reform its anti-dumping legislation between 2006 and 2008? We analyse this attempt to reform a legislative act regulating interest groups' access to public decision-makers by relying on collective action and principal – agent theory. Contrary to approaches assuming that the European Commission enjoys a large degree of agent autonomy to implement a more liberal EU trade policy than most member st…
The political science of European trade policy: A literature review with a research outlook
Political mobilization, veto players, and WTO litigation: Explaining European Union responses in trade disputes
Given the increasing relevance of judicial politics in the WTO, the relative scholarly neglect of EU performance in WTO litigation stands out as a surprising gap in the literature. With this article we contribute towards filling this gap. We do so by teasing out the conceptual distinction between dispute escalation and dispute outcome and by making plausible how the former may be caused by strong political mobilization and the latter by a high nu…
To enforce or not to enforce? Judicialization, venue shopping, and global regulatory harmonization
The regulation of intellectual property rights takes place in a range of international venues. This proliferation of international venues greatly enhances the potential for venue shopping. We argue that different levels of domestic regulation and differing degrees of judicialization account for actors' preferences over institutional venues. We take into consideration two scenarios. Conceiving of judicialization as the delegation of adjudication t…
WTO Judicial Politics and EU Trade Policy: Business Associations as Vessels of Special Interest
This article: Contributes to the literature on interest groups showing how the interplay of domestic and international institutional structures critically affects the character of lobbying. Contributes to a better understanding of EU trade politics, highlighting how such processes are systematically affected by changes in global governance structures. Traces empirically how important institutional innovations were introduced in EU trade policy ma…
The Domestic and Global Origins of Transnational Advocacy: Explaining Lobbying Presence During WTO Ministerial Conferences
This article explains varying levels of transnational advocacy initiated by domestic organized interests. Theoretically, we integrate the constraining and enabling impact of the domestic context with factors related to global opportunity structures. We test our hypotheses with an original data set consisting of all national organized interests that attended the Ministerial Conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the period 1995 throu…
No iceberg in sight: On the absence of WTO disputes challenging fossil fuel subsidies
Why the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is not (so) new, and why it is also not (so) bad
De Ville and Siles-Brügge (2016) argue that the politics of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations are entirely new and that it will lead to 'regulatory chill'. We think these two statements are untenable from a logical and empirical standpoint. While distributive political conflict is relatively absent because of firms' integration into global value chains, civil society organizations voice value-based opposition …
Patterns of Conflict and Mobilization: Mapping Interest Group Activity in EU Legislative Policymaking
Contemporary studies on interest group politics have mainly used single interest organizations as their central objects of study. This has led to a rich body of knowledge on the motivations of interest group mobilization, strategy development and even policy access and influence. The focus on single interest groups, however, has resulted in limited knowledge on aggregate patterns of interest groups’ activity. This article seeks to address this la…
Trade, Political Coalitions and Neo-Gothic Architecture
Why did English lords build Gothic ruins, Flemish textile barons recreate medieval cities, and the Prussian elites restore castles
Principals and transceivers: Regional authorities in EU trade negotiations
The EU conducts its external trade policy under close scrutiny by member-states. Yet, what about the role of regional authorities in federal states? To answer, we look at the principal-agent chain of delegation and explore to which extent regions with stakes and competencies in the matter exert control over EU policies. We distinguish three ideal-type roles regions can perform: principals in their own right, members of collective principals, and …
Towards Explaining Varying Degrees of Politicization of EU Trade Agreement Negotiations
Over the last decade, European Union (EU) trade agreement negotiations in the form of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada have been strongly contested. By contrast, many other EU trade negotiations have sailed on with far less politicization, or barely any at all. In this contribution, we assess a series of plausible explanation for these very varying degr…
Multilateralism, Bilateralism and Institutional Choice: The Political Economy of Regime Complexes in International Trade Policy
The global trading regime is characterized by the co‐existence of bilateral and multilateral politics. In this article, we offer a political economy explanation for this regime complex, by tracing public actors’ institutional choices back to political incentives for economic sectors and the firms active within them. First, we argue that product differentiation creates mixed motives on the part of firms, which in turn leads to a preference for the…
The European Union and the political economy of enforcing international trade rules
The European Commission keeps track of foreign trade barriers through its Market Access Strategy. In this study, we examine some of the key political-economic conditions under which the European Union decides whether and how to address these trade issues. Drawing on an original dataset of (allegedly) illegal foreign trade barriers faced by European Union businesses, we show that industries dominated by a few large companies are more successful in…
Seizing the moment: Regional opportunity structures and Wallonia’s temporary veto of the EU–Canada bilateral trade agreement
Constitutionally, Belgium represents the most extreme case of regional entities wielding power over EU external trade policymaking. Formally, the Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regions can wield veto power over Belgian positions. Yet, only once has a Belgian region actually made use of this capacity, when Wallonia temporarily blocked the conclusion of the EU trade agreement with Canada in 2016 (CETA). We show that political actors – legislative an…
Time for a New Atlanticism: The EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment and the International Order
There has been no shortage of critiques of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) signed on 30 December 2020. Many have perceived the CAI as a snub in the face of the Biden administration, which has the potential to jeopardise one of the most important strategic goals of the transatlantic alliance: setting aside four years of Trump’s populist economic policy and working in close coordination with a view to developing a united fr…
Studying the influence of interest groups on non-decisionmaking: Challenges and tools in research design
The political science literature has extensively analyzed the political influence of interest groups in recent years. Despite growing scholarly interest into their role in agenda-setting, a significant blind spot remains in understanding their control over non-decisionmaking. This lack of insight into interest groups’ negative agenda-setting influence is primarily due to three fundamental challenges in research design: conceptualization, sampling…
Balancing security and economics: Domestic state-firm relations and investment screening mechanisms in Europe
In an era of intense geopolitical competition, concerns about the impact of foreign investments in strategic sectors of the European economy have led policymakers to review European investment screening mechanisms (ISMs). In doing so, European institutions and member states have to find a balance between security and economics, maintaining a favorable environment for potential investors while simultaneously protecting specific sectors that they d…
Reacting to the politicization of trade policy
How do actors react to the politicisation of trade policy? This special issue aims to tackle this question, considering a broad set of actors including members of parliament, political parties, regional and national governments, interest groups, and the European Commission. To set the stage for the contributions to the special issue, in this introduction, we first conceptualise politicisation as the combination of high salience and high contestat…
Bootleggers, Baptists, and Policymakers: Domestic Discourse Coalitions in EU–Mercosur Negotiations
This article examines the dynamics of coalition formation in the context of the EU–Mercosur negotiations, utilizing the “Bootleggers and Baptists” analogy to understand how diverse actors—such as import‐competing sectors, civil society organizations, and policymakers—engage in issue‐linkage in public debates surrounding preferential trade agreement negotiations. The framework explores three types of coalition formation: opportunistic framing, str…
Political science (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · International trade (15 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Business (11 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (11 works) · European union (10 works)