Consensus-Seeking and Reversed Representation among Polish Officials in the Council of the European Union

Most issues that come before the Council of the European Union are decided without any recorded opposition. Constructivist literature explains that informal norms encourage state officials to conduct negotiations according to the standards of compromise and restraint. I argue that another mechanism may help explain consensus: state representatives must convince their ministerial superiors to support the agreements they reach. Effectively, rather than just representing their capitals in one of the Council’s bodies, they speak to their political principals on behalf of their colleagues. This article presents the results of theory-oriented process-tracing research. It describes how the causal mechanisms leading to consensus can be conceptualized and operationalized. It shows the results of testing the existence of their observable implications in a material gathered through in-depth interviews with Council officials from Poland, who can be seen as a “least likely” case of informal norms socialization but who, at the same time, are rarely the focus of analysis in the existing literature.