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peer-reviewed ; The Presidency plays a crucial role in the management and organisation of the Council's work and the institution's interactions with third parties. Formally, the Presidency just chairs the meetings of Council bodies; but over time, member states have endowed it with a range of procedural prerogatives to structure the Council's agenda and broker agreements, which post holders can potentially use to advance their own private interests. The potential for abuse of these powers raises two related questions: first, why would member states grant these powers to the Presidency; and second, is the Presidency actually able to use these powers to advance its own priorities and policy preferences? In response to the first question, functionalist theories suggest that member states delegate powers to the Presidency to reduce transaction costs and solve collective action. Member states grant the Presidency procedural prerogatives and provide it with administrative resources to ensure an efficient management of the Council's agenda, avoid inadvertent negotiation failure or sub-optimal negotiation outcomes, and provide adequate representation of the institution vis-à-vis external actors (Tallberg 2006, 2010). Another theory suggests that the Presidency acts as an adjudicator of the legitimacy of demands for concessions by member states that find themselves in the minority but claim to experience strong domestic pressures for non-compliance. By making impartial and thus credible recommendations about whether the formal voting rule or consensus decision-making should apply in these situations, the Presidency contributes to the long-term sustainability of international cooperation (Kleine 2013b, 2013a). The two explanatory accounts disagree about whether the growing role of the Presidency reflects an incremental accumulation of powers over time in response to new tasks or just an extension of already existing powers into new areas. Historical research on the development of Presidency powers could shed more light on ...

Supranational bureaucracies are often promoted as a solution to collective action problems. In the European Union context, investing the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy with new agenda-setting powers was expected to improve the coherence, continuity and efficiency of foreign policy-making. Relying on novel fine-grained and comprehensive data about the content and duration of working party meetings, the study maps and analyses the allocation of political attention to different foreign policy issues between 2001 and 2014. The results show that the empowerment of the High Representative by the Lisbon Treaty had little immediate effect on the Council's foreign policy agenda. However, the study also indicates that this result might be due to a lack of capability and ambition rather than weak institutional prerogatives.

peer-reviewed ; Supranational bureaucracies are often promoted as a solution to collective action problems. In the European Union context, investing the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR) with new agenda-setting powers was expected to improve the coherence, continuity, and efficiency of foreign policy-making. Relying on novel fine-grained and comprehensive data about the content and duration of working party meetings, the study maps and analyses the allocation of political attention to different foreign policy issues between 2001 and 2014. The results show that the empowerment of the HR by the Lisbon Treaty had little immediate effect on the Council's foreign policy agenda. However, the study also indicates that this result might be due to a lack of capability and ambition rather than weak institutional prerogatives.

peer-reviewed ; Imperial Germany is a prominent historical case in the study of Western Europe's political development. This paper investigates the number and content of political conflict dimensions from the foundation of the modern German state in 1866 to the end of Bismarck's reign as Chancellor in 1890. Methodologically, it applies dimension-reducing statistical methods to a novel dataset of content-coded parliamentary roll call votes. The analysis suggests that the emergence of the Catholic Centre Party in 1871 permanently transformed the conflict space from a single liberal-conservative divide to a two-dimensional space that distinguished positions on socio-economic issues and regime matters, respectively. The fact that positions on redistributive and regime issues were not aligned implies that theories stressing economic inequality as a driver for regime change are of limited applicability. Instead, the case of Imperial Germany highlights the importance of cross-cutting non-economic societal cleavages and the role of societal and political organisations in drawing attention to and perpetuating these divisions.

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

Imperial Germany is a prominent historical case in the study of Western Europe's political development. This article investigates the number and content of political conflict dimensions from the foundation of the modern German state in 1867 to the end of Bismarck's reign as Chancellor in 1890. Methodologically, it applies dimension-reducing statistical methods to a novel data set of content-coded parliamentary roll call votes. The analysis suggests that the emergence of the Catholic Centre Party in 1871 permanently transformed the conflict space from a single liberal-conservative divide to a two-dimensional space that distinguished positions on socio-economic issues and regime matters, respectively. The fact that positions on redistributive and regime issues were not aligned implies that theories stressing economic inequality as a driver for regime change are of limited applicability. Instead, the case of Imperial Germany highlights the importance of cross-cutting non-economic societal cleavages and the role of societal and political organizations in drawing attention to and perpetuating these divisions.

Little firm knowledge exists about the allocation of the Council's political attention across policy areas and over time. This article presents a new dataset of the date, duration, and policy coding of more than 70,000 meetings of Council working parties, covering all areas of the Council's policy activities between 1995 and 2014. In terms of both scope and resolution, the data allow for the generation of unprecedented insights into what issues occupy the Council's agenda, how that varies between and within policy areas, and how that changes over time. After discussing conceptual issues and explaining the construction of the dataset, the article demonstrates its usefulness and versatility through analyses of the Council's political attention at various levels of aggregation.

peer-reviewed ; Does the Presidency of the Council of the European Union have the ability to direct the political attention of this body by emphasising and de-emphasising policy issues according to its own priorities? This study examines this question empirically by relying on a new dataset on the monthly meeting duration of Council working parties in different policy areas between 1995 and 2014. The results of variance component analyses show that a considerable part of the over-time variation in the relative amount of political attention devoted to a policy area is systematically related to different Presidency periods. While not negating the constraints imposed on the Presidency by inherited agendas, programming, and coordination requirements with other actors, the findings are consistent with the view that the Presidency has substantial scope for agenda-setting by determining what issues are being discussed, when they are being discussed, and how much time is devoted for their discussion. ; ACCEPTED ; peer-reviewed

peer-reviewed ; Little firm knowledge exists about the allocation of the Council's political attention across policy areas and over time. This article presents a new dataset of the date, duration, and policy coding of more than 70,000 meetings of Council working parties, covering all areas of the Council's policy activities between 1995 and 2014. In terms of both scope and resolution, the data allow for the generation of unprecedented insights into what issues occupy the Council's agenda, how that varies between and within policy areas, and how that changes over time. After discussing conceptual issues and explaining the construction of the dataset, the article demonstrates its usefulness and versatility through analyses of the Council's political attention at various levels of aggregation. ; ACCEPTED ; peer-reviewed

peer-reviewed ; 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) pi and Cohen's (1960, A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement 20:37-46) kappa, as viable alternatives. Both indices adjust the dyadic similarity score for a large number of common absent ties. Cohen's kappa 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. ; ACCEPTED ; peer-reviewed

peer-reviewed ; 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. ; ACCEPTED ; peer-reviewed