Decision-Making in the Enlarged EU Council of Ministers: A Softer ...

to increase the decision-making duration, comparing acts adopted by the Council under
unanimity and under QMV without codecision gives us another insight into the time required
by the institution to adopt decisions under different formal rules.
To test our second hypothesis (H1b) on reduced time period until ministers take the majority
threshold into account and renounce consensual decisions, we focus on the amount of time
required to adopt QMV acts with and without vote made public, on the one hand, and on the
size on minority coalitions, on the other hand. More precisely, to test the increasing readiness
of ministers to stop negotiations even though the minority coalition comprises several
member states, we break down the public votes between 1-state coalition, 2-state coalition, 3
and more state-coalition.
b) Independent variables
To test for a specific effect of the 2004 enlargement, we rely on a simple dichotomous
variable to specify whether the act was adopted before or after the 1 May 2004. Admittedly, a
diminishing percentage of acts adopted under unanimity could be a result of the constant
extension of QMV to new areas by recent treaties, not of a greater difficulty to reach
consensual decisions with 27 member states. To help distinguishing the impact of
enlargement from other factors, we controlled for the year of adoption as well.
As mentioned above, the ‘hyper-activity’ of the Council in the months preceding the
enlargement should make us cautious when it comes to comparing durations before/after
enlargement. In particular, before May 2004, votes were apparently used to clear the table of
long-pending acts. For instance, it took 5227 days for the Council to adopt, in January 2003,
with votes made public, a regulation suspending import duties on certain weapons and
military equipment. This is why, as regards to our second hypothesis, we double-checked
results by excluding from the analysis the four extreme cases (the two shortest and the two
longest durations, i.e. 0,15% of observations) and comparing the different results.
To test our second set of hypotheses that relates to sector Council configurations and sector
differentiation, we created dichotomous variables for, first, each policy domain (hereafter
referred to as “sector”) and, second, for most of Council configurations. There are twenty
sector variables and eight configuration variables, for the reasons explained below. In
particular, to test hypothesis 2a – that sector differentiation also concerns the respective
influence of the consensus norm and the majority threshold -, we resort to three variables: 1.
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