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 number of veto players in the domestic reform process. We thus combine two explanatory factors into one theoretical framework suggesting that while the degree of political mobilization can account for whether or not a dispute involving the EU escalates, the number of veto players can account for whether or not the EU brings its policies in line with the complainants' demands. We illustrate the plausibility of our argument through an in-depth analysis of four instances in which the EU acted as defendant in a WTO dispute: the ban of hormone treated beef; export subsidies on sugar; bananas III; and butter.