Hayes-Renshaw, van Aken & Wallace: Explicitly contested voting in the Council 1994-2004
Fiona Hayes-Renshaw, Wim van Aken and Helen Wallace collected data on explicitly contested voting at ministerial level in the Council over the period 1994-2004. They provide us with rather steady patterns of explicitly contested voting across the period in terms of: proportions of decisions taken where contested voting was recorded; the different levels of contestation by country; and the issue areas in which explicit voting occurred more often. Analyses made on the basis of these data sets were presented in Hayes-Renshaw & Wallace (2006) The Council of Ministers, 2nd ed., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan and Hayes-Renshaw, van Aken & Wallace (2006) "When and Why the EU Council of Ministers Votes Explicitly", Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1.The data comes from several sources: data supplied by the Council Secretariat; some early information released informally to the researchers; the data collected by Mattila and Lane ("Why Unanimity in the Council? A Roll Call Analysis of Council Voting", European Union Politics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.31-52, 2001); data collected by Mattila ("Contested Decisions. Empirical Analysis of Voting in the Council of Ministers", European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 29-50, 2004). The aggregate data on contested votes by Member State 1994-2004 is found in the left column. The version of the data set published here includes a few minor corrections with respect to the previous publications of Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace! Also available in the left column is a more detailed description of the data on explicitly contested voting in 1994 released informally to the researchers.
For the period 1998-2004 records for individual Council sections were checked, producing a more detailed data set. This data set includes not only definitive legislative acts but also 'political agreements' (i.e. pre-final positions), 'common positions' (i.e. within the co-decision procedure with the European Parliament) as well as operational decisions, notably on the Council's implementation of its own transparency provisions. It includes information on the issue area, the Council taking the decision, the type of decision, voting rule, as well as a short searchable text description of the particular issue at hand. Codebook and data is available in the left column.
| F. Hayes-Renshaw, W. van Aken & H. Wallace: Voting in the Council 1994-2004 |
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