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Although qualified-majority voting is possible, member states in the Council of the European Union (EU) still adopt most policies by consensus. The agent-based model of coalition building in multilateral negotiations presented here addresses this puzzle. The model demonstrates that consensual decisions may emerge as an unintended by-product of government representatives' desire to form blocking coalitions. A qualitative case study demonstrates the plausibility of the model's assumptions and resulting coalition-building dynamics. Moreover, a quantitative test shows that the model's predictions correspond closely to the observed consensus rates. Finally, computational experiments predict a positive effect of the voting threshold but no effect of increases in membership on winning coalition size, which has important practical implications for institutional design and enlargement policy. Adapted from the source document.

Research on the intra-institutional consequences of differences in the EU's inter-institutional rule configurations is rare. This study investigates the effect of the empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) on the active involvement of ministers in Council decision-making. The empowerment of the EP is likely to increase the incentives for bureaucrats in the Council's preparatory bodies to refer decisions on legislative dossiers to ministers. The empirical analysis examines this claim with data on about 6,000 legislative decision-making processes that were concluded between 1980 and the end of 2007. The analysis demonstrates a strong and robust association between the type of legislative procedure and different decision-making levels in the Council: a more powerful EP makes Council decision-making more politicised. Adapted from the source document.

The similarity of states' foreign policy positions is a standard variable in the dyadic analysis of international relations. Recent studies routinely rely on Signorino and Ritter's (1999, Tau-b or not tau-b: Measuring the similarity of foreign policy positions. International Studies Quarterly 43:115-44) S to assess the similarity of foreign policy ties. However, S neglects two fundamental characteristics of the international state system: foreign policy ties are relatively rare and individual states differ in their innate propensity to form such ties. I propose two chance-corrected agreement indices, Scott's (1955, Reliability of content analysis: The case of nominal scale coding. The Public Opinion Quarterly 19:321-5) p and Cohen's (1960, A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement 20:37-46) k, as viable alternatives. Both indices adjust the dyadic similarity score for a large number of common absent ties. Cohen's k also takes into account differences in individual dyad members' total number of ties. The resulting similarity scores have stronger face validity than S. A comparison of their empirical distributions and a replication of Gartzke's (2007, The capitalist peace. American Journal of Political Science 51:166-91) study of the 'Capitalist Peace' indicate that the different types of measures are not substitutable. Adapted from the source document.

This article introduces the European Union Policy -- Making (EUPOL) dataset. The dataset contains the complete records of the European Commission's PreLex database, which tracks the interactions between the European institutions on legislative proposals and non-legislative policy documents over time. To be of maximum use to the research community, the dataset is both comprehensive and replicable. It relies on 2600 variables to describe the detailed event histories of more than 29,000 inter-institutional decision-making processes between 1975 and 2009. The data collection has been completely automated, enabling scholars to scrutinize and replicate the generation of the dataset. To illustrate the dataset's general utility and discuss specific pitfalls, I present a descriptive analysis of the outcome and duration of Council decision-making. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This study presents reliable cross-sectoral data on the relative involvement of working parties, senior committees and ministers in legislative decision-making of the Council of the European Union. In general, the results challenge the received wisdom that ministers are hardly involved in legislative decision-making. However, the findings also indicate that the involvement of different Council levels varies considerably across policy sectors. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the debate about the democratic legitimacy of Council decision-making. Adapted from the source document.

Committees of national officials play a major role in the decision-making of the European Union's main legislative body, the Council of Ministers. The study investigates the conditions under which bureaucrats decide on legislative dossiers without direct involvement of ministers. A statistical analysis is performed to examine this question, using an original data set of 439 legislative proposals. The results of the analysis indicate that formal institutional features such as the voting rule in the Council and the involvement of the European Parliament affect committee decision-making, whereas no effects of committee socialization and preference divergence among member states are identified. The results diminish concerns about the democratic legitimacy of Council decision-making to some extent, as the findings demonstrate that bureaucrats tend to decide only the less salient and more complex proposals. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2007.]

Little systematic empirical research exists about legislative decision-making in the Council of the European Union. This study contributes to closing this gap in the literature by examining which groups of actors within the Council decide on what type of issues. The Council structure is made up of a hierarchy consisting of working parties at the bottom, committees of senior officials in the middle and the ministers at the top. Based on a novel data set of legislative decisions made by the Council, the study examines the relative importance of these different Council levels. Two important findings emerge from the analysis: first, ministers are more involved in legislative decision-making than often assumed in the literature; second, the involvement of higher Council levels increases with features of dossiers that are related to political conflict. Although the results reduces worries about a lack of political accountability of Council decision-making, they cannot dispel these concerns completely. Adapted from the source document.

Little is known about the effects of the inter-institutional linkages created through the establishment of the codecision procedure on decision-making in the Council of the European Union. After a review of the existing literature and theories on this topic, we examine to what extent the codecision procedure leads to more involvement of ministers in Council decision-making and to a more powerful position of the Presidency in the internal negotiation process of the Council. The results show that the initially positive effect of codecision on the politicization of Council decision-making has been offset in recent years by a growing lack of transparency in inter-institutional proceedings caused by the use of informal trialogue negotiations to conclude the procedure early. However, our study also suggests that the country holding the Presidency does not occupy a more privileged position in the Council's internal co-operation network as a result of these developments. Thus, with respect to the Council, informal inter-institutional negotiation practices seem to decrease the transparency of the decision-making process and the accountability of the actors involved, but they may not have as adverse an effect on who gets what in terms of policy as previously thought. Adapted from the source document.

More and more legislative decisions are reached in early stages of the co-decision procedure through informal negotiations among representatives of the EU institutions. This study argues that the European Parliament has an advantage in such negotiations relative to the Council due to the latter's limited organizational resources to handle the increased legislative workload under the co-decision procedure. The main implication of this theoretical argument is that the Parliament's impact on the content of legislation should be higher when informal negotiations are conducted rather than when agreement is reached at the end of the procedure in conciliation. To examine this claim, a quantitative comparative study of the success of the Parliament's amendments in two legislative decision-making processes in the field of transport was conducted. The results reveal that the EP's influence during co-decision is indeed larger in the case of an early agreement. Adapted from the source document.