Frank M. Häge: Committee decision-making in the Council of the European Union
This dataset formed the basis for the study on Council committee decision-making published 2007 in European Union Politics 8 (3): 299-328. The dataset includes information on 439 EU legislative decision-making processes initiated by the Commission between 1 July 2000 and 1 January 2004. The sample includes only legislation adopted through either the co-decision or consultation procedure. Furthermore, the sample is limited to binding legal acts that deal with internal policy issues and to acts which the Council considered to be of a legislative nature. Non-binding recommendations or opinions, budgetary or administrative acts, inter-institutional agreements or acts concerning external policy issues are not part of the sample. Note that the sample is also restricted to proposals on which the Council had reached a positive first reading decision by 1 January 2005. The exclusion from the sample of right-censored cases and proposals that were withdrawn by the Commission might be problematic for answering certain research questions.
The dataset contains information on institutional features (type of legal instrument, legislative procedure, voting rule), the content of the proposal (title, policy area(s), provision for a Comitology committee, number of recitals), characteristics of the Council working party involved (name, average number of meetings per month), and the degree of political conflict among ministers (polarization, core, qmv-core). The dataset includes also information on the process of decision-making and the actors involved: the dataset identifies the responsible Commission Directorate-General, the dates of the adoption of the Commission proposal and of its transmission to the Council, as well as the dates, session numbers, type of agenda-item, and the Council formation of all ministerial meetings concerned with the proposal. The dataset contains also information on which Council level a certain piece of legislation was discussed and eventually decided. Most of the information to construct the variables was derived from the Commission online-database PreLex, from the Commission proposals and from various Council documents. The measures of political conflict among ministers are based on cabinet composition data from several issues of the Political Data Yearbook published by the European Journal of Political Research and on policy position data from the Chapel Hill 2002 Expert Survey on Positioning of Political Parties on European Integration conducted by Liesbet Hooghe and colleagues. For further details on the sample selection and the data sources please consult the article and the codebook.
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