The Study of Decision-Making Speed in the European Union
| Author | Jonathan Golub |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1465116507085961 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Study of Decision-Making
Speed in the European Union
Methods, Data and Theory
Jonathan Golub
University of Reading, UK
167
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116507085961
Volume 9 (1): 167–179
Copyright© 2008
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore
The study of European Union (EU) decision-making speed holds both
substantive and theoretical importance. Substantively, it helps identify which
factors produce or avert legislative paralysis, an insight that is a necessary
precondition for informed debate about potential EU institutional reforms.
Indeed, I entered this field in 1994 while at the European University Institute
in Florence to test whether the reforms contained in the famous 1987 Single
European Act (SEA) had unblocked and expedited legislation. Theoretically,
the study of EU decision-making speed helps us assess the utility of the tools
we use to understand the EU, such as coalition and spatial models that
emphasize formal rules, as well as deliberative and constructivist approaches
that privilege informal norms.
As more people gravitated to the study of EU decision-making speed,
survival analysis rightly became their method of choice. In a recent article
(Golub, 2007), I defended three claims about survival analysis and EU
decision-making: first, that all previous survival studies on the topic, includ-
ing two of my own, suffer from methodological problems that render their
findings unreliable; second, that researchers should apply a particular form
of survival analysis, a Cox model that accounts for state changes in the data
– by using time-varying covariates (TVCs) – and non-proportional covariate
effects; third, that we should apply this methodologically superior approach
to my 2002 TVC-coded data set of Directives.
The purpose of this forum was to subject my three claims to scrutiny and
identify ways to modify and extend them. Thomas König, the author of
two studies I discuss in my article, was invited to defend his previous
methodological choices and to re-analyse his data in light of my criticisms
(König, 2008). My co-authored piece (Golub and Steunenberg, 2007) grew out
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