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The Council of the European Union is the European Union's most powerful legislative body. Yet, we still have limited information about Council politics because of the lack of suitable data. This paper validates a new approach to studying Council politics entitled DICEU – Debates in the Council of the European Union. This approach is the first to leverage the public videos of Council deliberations as a data source. We demonstrate the face, convergent, and predictive validity of DICEU data. Governments' ideal points scaled from these videos yield meaningful and well-known conflict dimensions. Moreover, governments' positions during Council negotiations correlate highly with expert assessments and predict subsequent votes on legislative acts. We conclude that DICEU data provide a promising new approach to studying Council politics and multilevel governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines member state bargaining success in legislative negotiations in the European Union. Bargaining success is thought to be determined by factors attributable to intervention behaviour, relative policy positions and power. Intervention relates to a member state’s efforts to make its position known over the course of negotiations, relative policy positions relate to a member state’s position in the policy space under negotiation relative to other actors’ positions, and power refers to the size of the member state. New measures for bargaining success are introduced that account for the saliency of the legislative proposals under consideration. The results presented suggest that there are more winners than losers when measuring bargaining success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Making interventions during negotiations within the Council of Ministers is the primary way in which member states make their policy positions known to one another and attempt to influence negotiations. In spite of this, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the factors that influence a member state’s decision to intervene. This paper seeks to address this gap in our understanding by analysing a new data set that specifies which member states are intervening and at what level of negotiation within the Council they are doing so. Significant differences between member state intervention behaviour are observed, and these differences can be explained to some degree by structural characteristics of the policy space within which member states negotiate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to the logic of standard veto bargaining models with complete information, bargaining in the European Union should never reach the second reading of the ordinary legislative procedure (co-decision). Even so, non-agreement at the first reading occurs frequently in European Union decision making. How can this be explained? Drawing upon game theory on bargaining with incomplete information, two specific predictions with regard to the occurrence of first-reading non-agreements can be generated. First-reading agreements are less likely to occur (1) the greater the distance between the ideal point of the Council and the ideal point of the European Parliament and (2) the greater the salience attached to the proposal. This article combines positional and proposal-specific data and finds robust support for both hypotheses in two different empirical tests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Informal trilogue meetings are the main legislative bargaining forum in the European Union, yet their dynamics remain largely understudied in a quantitative context. This article builds on the assumption that the negotiating delegations of the European Parliament and the Council play a two-level game whereby these actors can use their intra-institutional constraint to extract inter-institutional bargaining success. Negotiators can credibly claim that their hands are tied if the members of their parent institutions hold similar preferences and do not accept alternative proposals or if their institution is divided and negotiators need to defend a fragile compromise. Employing a measure of document similarity (minimum edit distance) between an institution's negotiation mandate and the trilogue outcome to measure bargaining success, the analysis supports the hypothesis for the European Parliament, but not for the Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have explored how the European Union's institutions shape political behavior and legislative outcomes in the EU. Far fewer examine in detail how individual institutional changes have come about. This paper presents a formal model that allows us to analyze under what conditions institutional change should be expected, with a focus on the Council of Ministers' voting rule in particular. Changes in the number of member states in the EU, changes in the legislative procedures and changes in the policy areas under consideration are found to affect the ability to pass legislation, and thereby provide the impetus for adjustments in equilibrium coalition sizes and chamber voting rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who gains legislative influence in early agreement negotiations (trilogues) between the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union? Practitioners from both institutions suspect that it is the other side. Meanwhile, critics point at trilogues' lack of transparency. This article proposes that legislative power and institutional transparency are inversely related: Opacity makes an actor more influential in political negotiations. The argument is tested on a matched sample of legislative files from the 1999–2009 period. The findings suggest that the European Parliament became more influential in early agreement negotiations – where it became opaque vis-à-vis the Council. In such negotiations, the relative influence of the European Parliament substantially increased; by contrast, the European Parliament did not gain influence in negotiations where it remained transparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of cross-institutional partisan links between the Council and the European Parliament is a key feature of bicameral law-making in the European Union. However, assessing the conditions under which national parties can and do influence ‘their’ Members of the European Parliament is complicated by a lack of measurements of the national interest at stake. Analysing the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals regulation, this article shows that national parties represented in the Council only seek to influence ‘their’ Members of the European Parliament when the national interest at stake is sufficiently large and, more importantly, when a legislative deal has been struck. These findings have implications for our understanding of legislative politics in the European Union and the relationship between Members of the European Parliament, European Parliamentary Groups and the Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are national governments responsive to citizens’ opinions when negotiating policies in the Council of the European Union? Conceiving of the Council’s policy-making space as encompassing left-right and pro-anti integration issues, I argue that governments apply different ‘modes of responsiveness’ on these issues. As left-right issues are more reliably and intensely salient in domestic elections than pro-anti integration issues, governments’ responsiveness to left-right public opinion should be more systematic than to pro-anti integration opinion. Statistical analyses of 3700 policy positions of governments in the Council demonstrate that governments highly structure their responsiveness on left-right issues according to electoral cycles and systems (‘systematic mode’). However, they only sporadically respond to public opinion on pro-anti integration issues, when parties and events trigger the public salience of integration (‘sporadic mode’). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Council of Ministers rarely records negative individual votes, much less rejected proposals. The literature explains this high level of support by the Council’s ‘culture of consensus’ and the few negative votes are explained as signalling to the domestic audience. I introduce an alternative explanation for ministers’ explicit disagreement: during the negotiations preceding the final vote, ministers issue veto threats. To remain credible in the future, they must be prepared to carry through with their threats if their demands are not met. To test this argument, I specify domestic level conditions that enable the minister to issue credible, strategic threats in the first place. Furthermore, I introduce domestic level scrutiny as a proxy for the transparency of EU level negotiations. I find that the effect of strategic threats is strong for those cases which are not under domestic level scrutiny (low transparency). By contrast, I find no effect of strategic threats for cases which are under domestic level scrutiny (high transparency). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal trilogues have become a standard operating procedure in the European Union’s ordinary legislative procedure. Generally, their occurrence is seen as a trade-off in which speed is prioritized over inclusive decision making. Hence, a relationship is assumed between intra-institutional processes and inter-institutional interactions. This article therefore tries to explain the number of informal trilogues in first readings. The contribution of this analysis is twofold. First, it shows that intra-institutional political processes such as contestation of the rapporteur’s preferences, politicization inside the Council and the number of shadow rapporteurs matter. Second, it for the first time measures the number of informal trilogues directly for the full population of post-Lisbon legislative files. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines transparency and censorship in the Council of Ministers of the European Union from 1999 to 2009. We measure transparency by considering the timeliness of record release and the levels of censorship applied to records when (and if) they are released. We show that legislation introduced in 2001 (Regulation 1049) triggered a massive shift towards greater transparency, in line with its intention. However, we also show that the trend towards greater transparency has been interrupted by the enlargement rounds in 2004 and 2007. We attribute this fact to inexperience on the part of the new member states and the resulting need for censorship while these states adjusted to the negotiation styles in the Council. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conciliation committee is the ultimate bicameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? We argue that its institutional setup is biased in favour of the Council of Ministers. Employing the Wordfish algorithm, we show that the joint text is more similar to the Council common position than to the parliamentary reading in almost 70 percent of the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. The European Parliament is more successful in the post-Amsterdam period, when the Council decides by qualified majority voting, the rapporteur comes from a large party, the European Commission is supportive, and when national administrations are more involved in the implementation process than the Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Here, I introduce a novel approach towards data collection for comparative research and present a new data infrastructure on parties, elections and governments, the Parliament and Government Composition Database (ParlGov). This data infrastructure combines a database, data presentation in webpages and software scripts in order to generate more dynamic datasets and to facilitate cooperation. So far, it includes information about more than 1000 parties, around 600 elections (national and European Parliament) and almost 1000 governments with their party composition. These observations are linked to a wide set of information about party positions and make it possible to derive various datasets for studies in political science. To provide a first glance into the potential of this new data infrastructure, I map the political space of the European Union (EU) by drawing on this source. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Union (EU) is assumed to suffer from a democratic deficit. It is often posited that in the EU there is only a weak and indirect connection between public preferences and policy change. This article investigates empirically whether any relationship exists between public support for European integration and EU policy output (1973—2008). Using a new indicator of policy output — the volume of important legislation produced in a semester — I discover a surprising relationship between public support and legislative production. Employing vector autoregression (VAR), I demonstrate that public EU support Granger-causes legislative output but not vice versa, and that the relationship is strong up to the middle of the 1990s but non-existent afterwards. The effect is robust to the inclusion of indicators of the state of the economy and government preferences. In addition, I discover that the average level of EU support in the Council of Ministers follows unemployment levels with a four-year delay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the dimensionality and nature of political conflict in the European Union Council of Ministers between 1998 and 2007. By comparing policy platforms of member state governments, multidimensional scaling techniques are employed to make inferences about the dimensionality of the Council’s political space. The dimensions are interpreted performing 1250 multiple regression analyses. The results largely corroborate the assumption that cleavages are structured along geographically defined clusters of states. After Eastern enlargement (2004), a North—South divide was replaced by an East—West cleavage. The analysis moreover suggests that there are two stable conflict dimensions within the Council’s political space. The first is an integration dimension that represents the support for deepening European Union integration and the transfer of sovereignty to a supranational level. The second is a ‘policy’ dimension, manifested predominantly in disputes over redistributive policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to evaluate the emerging patterns of decision-making in the European Union after the first Eastern enlargement through an analysis of voting positions in the Council of Ministers. By applying three methods (cluster analysis, factor analysis and Bayesian item-response modelling), it assesses the new spatial dimensions of EU policy-making. The results show that the level of open contestation at the Council meetings has risen following enlargement, but the general coalition-building patterns remain similar to the ones in the old EU. The analysis also indicates that it is possible to identify a winning coalition that constitutes the critical mass of the qualified majority of weighted votes for the periods before and after the Eastern enlargement. Furthermore, the size of the largest coalition in relation to the qualified majority threshold becomes smaller in the EU of 25 member states, which may herald a new era of increased policy stability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The potential impact of the EU Council Presidency on legislative decision-making has been frequently identified. This article provides an empirical analysis of the Presidency's influence on decision outcomes based on a large-n data set. Two counterfactuals are used to represent consensual decision-making and hard bargaining in the Council. The role of supranational actors is controlled for directly. The findings show that a member state benefits from holding the Presidency during the final stages of the legislative proceedings. Besides the support of supranational actors, the regression analysis controls for the voting threshold, the type of proposal and salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that MEPs from national parties represented in the Council of Ministers are more active as rapporteurs on Codecision legislation than MEPs from national parties not represented in the Council. EP rapporteurs can be thought of as informed actors offering non-binding advice to the EP plenary. Expert committees and the Council presidency play a similar role in the Council. Compared with rapporteurs from parties not represented in the Council, EP rapporteurs from parties represented in the Council may incur lower costs in coordinating their proposals with the informed actors in the Council. If this is the case, they should be more interested in writing Codecision reports than are MEPs from parties not represented in the Council. This possibility is investigated using a data set consisting of all Codecision legislation initiated by the Commission between 1999 and 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rotating presidency of the European Council is a curious, and unusual, institutional feature. I propose a formal theoretic model that compares a variety of decision-making procedures, including rotating the leadership position in a decision-making council, referendums on each policy issue, and electing a Council president. From the results of the model I conclude that the current version of the rotating presidency has a lot to recommend it. Rotating agenda-setting authority allows for the exploration of new mixtures of policies that might not be discovered or tried under other kinds of procedures. However, I also argue that, once the European Union expands to over 20 members, the procedure may no longer be sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]