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

3. Research design
a) Data
In order to test these hypotheses, we use a dataset of all definitive legislative acts adopted by
the Council from January 2002 to December 2008 (more than 1300 cases). This dataset is
built within Sciences Po’s Observatory of European Institutions. It is unique as, first, it
documents the whole process of each legislative act and includes data on various aspects of
decision-making, such as duration, votes made public, the DG in charge of the proposal, the
number of readings within the codecision procedure or the number of B/A points par act (see
the list of variables in Annex 1). Second, it includes sector data drawn from the Directory of
Community Legislation in Force, which allows for innovative policy domain analyses.
The dataset is based on the ‘definitive legislative acts’ adopted by the Council, for two
reasons: 1) they are presumably the most important acts; 2) they are the only acts for which
votes cast by member states during their final adoption are systematically made public. Even if
the votes made public might not reveal the actual level of opposition in the Council (see
above), this data is crucial for our analysis as it allows for other calculations such as the
decision-making duration when votes are or are not made public.
The legislative acts included in the dataset are drawn from the Monthly Summaries of Council
acts that are available on the Council website 2 . These summaries list all legislative acts
adopted each month, as well as the votes made public and the voting rule. As mentioned in the
previous part, the latter is essential if we want to compare the Council’s legislative output
ruled by QMV / unanimity and assess the impact of these formal rules.
The database also contains data related to the Commission and the EP, for theoretical and
practical reasons. As other academics argue, it appears ‘impossible to tell the story of Council
decision-making without reference to other institutional actors (notably the EP and the
Commission)’ (Pollack, Shaffer, 2008). From an empirical perspective, having data on the
transmission of Commission proposals to the Council and their adoption date by the Council
allows for calculations of decision-making duration. As for data on the EP, it notably relates
to the codecision procedure. It enables to differentiate acts adopted by the Council under
QMV, within and outside the codecision procedure.
2 http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.aspx?id=551&lang=EN
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