ABSTRACT
The descriptive analysis in Chapter 6 showed considerable variation between different Council formations in the extent of committee decision-making. In this chapter, I inspect possible causes of this variation through a multivariate statistical analysis. More precisely, I examine whether the explanatory factors identified in Chapter 4 show a statistical relationship with the involvement of ministers in Council decision-making. Like the descriptive analysis, the statistical analysis considers the decision-making process only up to the first-reading decision of the Council and concentrates on the distinction between the bureaucratic and ministerial level. In the next section, I describe the operationalisation and the data sources of the dependent and the independent variables. In the second section, I present the results of the analysis. In the third section, I discuss preliminary conclusions about the implications of the results of the explanatory quantitative analysis.
