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"The Council of Ministers of the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

This thesis examines legislative decision making in the European Union with a specific focus upon decision making in the Council of Ministers. It examines the manner in which member states seek to influence the legislative process at different levels of negotiation within the Council. The first empirical contribution of the thesis (Chapter 4) has two aims. It first examines the influence that legislative rules and procedures have upon the legislative process. It elaborates upon a one-dimensional procedural model of EU politics that explicitly captures the structure of the legislative game by accounting for the order in which actors move, and the manner in which the order of the game affects each actor's ability to influence legislative outputs. ; TARA (Trinity?s Access to Research Archive) has a robust takedown policy. Please contact us if you have any concerns: rssadmin@tcd.ie

Making interventions during negotiations within the Council of Ministers is the primary way in which member states make their policy positions known to one another and attempt to influence negotiations. In spite of this, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the factors that influence a member state's decision to intervene. This paper seeks to address this gap in our understanding by analysing a new data set that specifies which member states are intervening and at what level of negotiation within the Council they are doing so. Significant differences between member state intervention behaviour are observed, and these differences can be explained to some degree by structural characteristics of the policy space within which member states negotiate. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Detailed Contents -- List of Tables, Figures and Boxes -- Preface -- List of Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction -- PART I WHO DOES WHAT? -- 2 National Representatives Decide: the Ministers in Council -- 3 Officials Prepare the Ground: the Preparatory Bodies -- 4 Bureaucrats Organize and Advise: the Council Secretariat -- 5 Taking Turns at the Wheel: the Presidency -- PART II WITH WHOM? -- 6 Overlapping Competences: the Council and theEuropean Council -- 7 Competition and Cooperation: the Council and theCommission -- 8 An Evolving Partnership: the Council and the European Parliament -- 9 Not Just Governments: the Council and the Member States -- PART III HOW? -- 10 Less Often than Expected: Voting in the Council -- 11 Compromise and Consensus: Negotiation and Bargaining in the Council -- 12 Conclusions -- Appendices -- Bibliography -- Index.

Making interventions during negotiations within the Council of Ministers is the primary way in which member states make their policy positions known to one another and attempt to influence negotiations. In spite of this, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the factors that influence a member state's decision to intervene. This paper seeks to address this gap in our understanding by analysing a new data set that specifies which member states are intervening and at what level of negotiation within the Council they are doing so. Significant differences between member state intervention behaviour are observed, and these differences can be explained to some degree by structural characteristics of the policy space within which member states negotiate.

The Treaty of Lisbon has brought remarkable changes and innovations to the European Union. As far as the Council of Ministers of the European Union ("the Council" hereinafter) is concerned, there are two significant innovations: double qualified majority voting and new rotating Presidency scheme, which are considered to make the working of the Council more efficiently, stably and consistently. With the modification relating to other key institutions, the Commission and the European Parliament, and with certain procedures being re-codified, the power of the Council varies accordingly, where the inter-institutional balance counts for more research. As the Council is one of the co-legislatures of the Union, the legislative function of it would be probably influenced, positively or negatively, by the internal innovations and the inter-institutional re-balance. Has the legislative function of the Council been reinforced or not? How could the Council better reach its functional goal designed by the Treaties' drafter? How to evaluate the Council's evolution after Lisbon Treaty in the light of European integration? This thesis is attempting to find the answers by analyzing two main internal innovations and inter-institutional re-balance thereinafter.

An important question for the European Union is to know whether its institutions will permit it to escape from political deadlocks each time a question is at stake. Two studies [Baldwin, Felsenthal1] suggest, by using the Impartial Culture assumption to model the voting behavior, that the EU could only take a decision in 2% of the cases with its current voting mechanisms. The Impartial Culture model has been criticized from a theoretical point of view [Feix], a political one [Moberg] and does not fit with experimental data [Gelman]. The generalized Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption we consider in this paper is an improvement of this first model. We here study the probability of approval under this assumption, first for the asymptotic case (reached when the number of countries $N$ goes to infinity), and next with computer enumerations and Monte Carlo simulations for the European Union with 27 members. We consider both the Treaty of Nice and some proposals for the European Constitution.

An important question for the European Union is to know whether its institutions will permit it to escape from political deadlocks each time a question is at stake. Two studies [Baldwin, Felsenthal1] suggest, by using the Impartial Culture assumption to model the voting behavior, that the EU could only take a decision in 2% of the cases with its current voting mechanisms. The Impartial Culture model has been criticized from a theoretical point of view [Feix], a political one [Moberg] and does not fit with experimental data [Gelman]. The generalized Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption we consider in this paper is an improvement of this first model. We here study the probability of approval under this assumption, first for the asymptotic case (reached when the number of countries $N$ goes to infinity), and next with computer enumerations and Monte Carlo simulations for the European Union with 27 members. We consider both the Treaty of Nice and some proposals for the European Constitution.

An important question for the European Union is to know whether its institutions will permit it to escape from political deadlocks each time a question is at stake. Two studies [Baldwin, Felsenthal1] suggest, by using the Impartial Culture assumption to model the voting behavior, that the EU could only take a decision in 2% of the cases with its current voting mechanisms. The Impartial Culture model has been criticized from a theoretical point of view [Feix], a political one [Moberg] and does not fit with experimental data [Gelman]. The generalized Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption we consider in this paper is an improvement of this first model. We here study the probability of approval under this assumption, first for the asymptotic case (reached when the number of countries $N$ goes to infinity), and next with computer enumerations and Monte Carlo simulations for the European Union with 27 members. We consider both the Treaty of Nice and some proposals for the European Constitution.

An important question for the European Union is to know whether its institutions will permit it to escape from political deadlocks each time a question is at stake. Two studies [Baldwin, Felsenthal1] suggest, by using the Impartial Culture assumption to model the voting behavior, that the EU could only take a decision in 2% of the cases with its current voting mechanisms. The Impartial Culture model has been criticized from a theoretical point of view [Feix], a political one [Moberg] and does not fit with experimental data [Gelman]. The generalized Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption we consider in this paper is an improvement of this first model. We here study the probability of approval under this assumption, first for the asymptotic case (reached when the number of countries $N$ goes to infinity), and next with computer enumerations and Monte Carlo simulations for the European Union with 27 members. We consider both the Treaty of Nice and some proposals for the European Constitution.