Public deliberations in the Council of the European Union: Introducing and validating DICEU
| Author | Christopher Wratil,Sara B Hobolt |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519839152 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Forum |
Forum
Public deliberations
in the Council of
the European Union:
Introducing and
validating DICEU
Christopher Wratil
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Cologne Center for
Comparative Politics, University of Cologne,
Cologne, Germany
Sara B Hobolt
Department of Government, London School of Economics
and Political Science, London, UK
Abstract
The Council of the European Union is the European Union’s most powerful legislative
body. Yet, we still have limited information about Council politics because of the lack of
suitable data. This paper validates a new approach to studying Council politics entitled
DICEU – Debates in the Council of the European Union. This approach is the first to
leverage the public videos of Council deliberations as a data source. We demonstrate
the face, convergent, and predictive validity of DICEU data. Governments’ ideal points
scaled from these videos yield meaningful and well-known conflict dimensions.
Moreover, governments’ positions during Council negotiations correlate highly with
expert assessments and predict subsequent votes on legislative acts. We conclude
that DICEU data provide a promising new approach to studying Council politics and
multilevel governance.
Corresponding author:
Christopher Wratil, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Adolphus Busch
Hall, 27 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Email: cwratil@fas.harvard.edu
European Union Politics
2019, Vol. 20(3) 511–531
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1465116519839152
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Keywords
Council, dataset, governments, quantitative text analysis, videos
The Council of the European Union (EU) is the EU’s primary legislative body,
where national ministers discuss, negotiate, and vote on legislative proposals. Most
research on politics in the Council is based on either expert interview data or
voting records. These data sources have generated key insights into intergovern-
mental politics in the Council, exploring what factors drive governments’ position-
taking and voting (e.g. Bailer et al., 2015; Hagemann et al., 2017; Hagemann and
Høyland, 2008; Thomson, 2011) and the nature of alignments and latent conflict
dimensions in Council politics (e.g. Mattila, 2009; Plechanovova, 2011; Thomson,
2009; Thomson et al., 2004; Zimmer et al., 2005). They have also been used to test
different bargaining models and estimate the distribution of power among member
states and across EU institutions (e.g. Bailer, 2004; Costello and Thomson, 2013;
Golub, 2012; Rasmussen and Reh, 2013; Thomson, 2008, 2011). However, existing
data sources have key limitations when it comes to studying legislative politics in
the Council. Expert data may be influenced by interviewee bias and are hard to
replicate for other researchers (e.g. Bueno de Mesquita, 2004). Voting data, in
turn, tell us little about the preceding negotiation process and lack variation,
since 98% of all votes are cast in favor of the proposal (Hagemann et al., 2017).
In addition, none of the available datasets on Council politics captures the evolu-
tion of negotiations on legislative files over time.
In this article, we propose a novel approach to studying the Council, which uses
video recordings of public deliberations. Since the entry into force of the Lisbon
Treaty, the Council must deliberate in public when negotiating legislative files and
discussing strategic questions
1
and all debates are video-streamed online. We pre-
sent the first study that rigorously collects, codes, and validates these public delib-
erations as a data source to study the Council. We label our data gathering
approach DICEU – “Debates in the Council of the European Union”. The approach
produces textual data of all speeches by national ministers and other representa-
tives in the Council as well as human codings of intergovernmental conflicts.
We validate the DICEU approach in three steps. First, we demonstrate its face
validity with a pilot dataset covering Council meetings in the Economic and
Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) configuration between 2010 and 2015.
Scaling governments’ ideal points with an item-response theory (IRT) model as
well as different quantitative text analysis (QTA) models yields meaningful latent
conflict dimensions that are in line with prior knowledge about politics in the
Council. High correlations between the ideal points scaled from human coding
and those from text highlight the potential of QTA models for future analyses of
Council politics. Moreover, we demonstrate DICEU’s potential for generating
further discoveries by tracing the dynamic development of conflict in the
512 European Union Politics 20(3)
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