The Duration of Multilateral Negotiations in the Council of the European Union
Most existing formal theories of group choice focus on predicting the outcome of decision-making. However, the duration of decision-making is also of substantial interest, as it indicates the ability of a collective actor to respond to changes in the social, political, and economic environment in an efficient and timely manner. I use an agent-based model of coalition building to generate hypotheses about the duration of multilateral international negotiations. The model produces predictions about the effects of changes in the number of negotiators, the initial preference distribution, and the general level of impatience of negotiators. According to the model, increases in the number of actors and decreases in impatience lead to increases in the duration of decision-making. In these instances, the model provides a clear mechanism for generally accepted cause-effect relationships. However, it also provides somewhat counter-intuitive predictions: preference heterogeneity affects decision-making duration only marginally and preference polarization not at all. In this respect, the model provides novel alternative hypothesis that can be tested against existing theoretical accounts.
The Policy Agenda of the Council of the EU
Little reliable knowledge exists about the size and diversity of the policy agenda of the Council of the European Union. This study maps the Council’s agenda between 2000 and 2008, relying on a new dataset on the monthly meeting frequency of the Council’s sectoral working parties and committees. Special attention is given to the potential of the Presidency to shape the agenda. The findings indicate that the Council’s agenda has grown by more than one-third during the study period, with the area of Foreign Affairs being the by far largest contributor to this growth. While the increase in Foreign Affairs is somewhat disproportional, the overall diversity of the Council’s agenda decreased only moderately over time. The overall diversity of the agenda and the agenda size of individual policy areas vary systematically across Presidency periods. These differences provide us with estimates for the upper limit of a possible effect of Presidency priorities, and indicate that further theoretical and empirical work on the ability of the Presidency to shape the macro-agenda of the Council is warranted.
Agent-Based Modelling of Coalition-Building in the Council of the EU
In contrast to most other international organizations that allow decisions to be adopted by qualified majority, the European Union (EU) has means at its disposal to enforce the domestic implementation of such agreements. Yet despite lacking a serious compliance problem, member states still adopt most EU policies by consensus. To address this puzzle, I develop a computational model of coalition building in international negotiations. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions can emerge as the unintended by-product of government representatives’ desire to form a blocking minority. A case study of negotiations in the Council of the EU illustrates the plausibility of the model’s assumptions and resulting coalition building dynamics. In addition, a quantitative test demonstrates that the model’s predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. The theoretical analysis suggests a nonlinear relationship in which small changes in the voting threshold may lead to unexpectedly large changes in winning coalition size.
Agenda-Setting by the European Commission: Using Computer-Assisted Classification Methods to Classify Policy Documents
The European Commission is often considered to be the main agenda-setter in EU policy-making. The Commission produces hundreds of policy documents every year. However, reliable quantitative accounts of the agenda-setting activity of the Commission over extended periods of time and across several policy areas are not available. We need such accounts if we want to be able to adjudicate between competing theories of the role of the Commission in the European integration process. While information on the Commission’s agenda-setting activity is now in principle available in online databases such as PreLex, a major problem is the absence of a comprehensive policy classification scheme with mutually exclusive categories. For a considerable number of documents in PreLex, policy labels are either missing or several labels are assigned to a single document, making the classification ambiguous. In this study, I conduct classification experiments to investigate the performance of computer-assisted document classification methods for generating correct policy labels for Commission documents solely based on the words in their titles. The findings indicate that the support vector machine classifier is able to classify about 75 percent of the documents into the correct policy category, regardless of which combination of pre-processing options are chosen to generate the input matrix for the analysis.
The Engine of European Integration? An Empirical Analysis of the Agenda-Setting Power of the European Commission
This study examines the agenda-setting power of the Commission in legislative decision-making of the European Union. The theoretical discussion illustrates that the Commission has no reason to put proposals on the legislative agenda that go against the interests of the Council or the Parliament. Thus, the high adoption rate of Commission proposals does not indicate that the Commission is successful in having policies adopted against the will of member states and parliamentarians, but rather that the Commission is effective in anticipating the resistance of these actors. The Commission only introduces proposals that have a reasonable chance of being adopted in the first place. The results of the quantitative analysis of the Commission’s legislative agenda-setting activity between 1979 and 2007 are consistent with the implications of this view. In particular, the analysis demonstrates that the unanimity requirement in the Council and, to a lesser extent, the involvement of the European Parliament as a co-legislator constrained the Commission’s agenda-setting activity.