ABSTRACT
The Council of Ministers is the main legislative institution in the European Union (EU). Although the European Parliament (EP) has been granted more and more legislative rights over the last two-and-a-half decades, the Parliament has still no say in a number of policy areas. In contrast, no legislative decision is made in the EU without the explicit agreement of the Council. Corresponding to this important role as a legislator, decision-making in the Council has received considerable attention from a theoretical point of view. A number of scholars offer sophisticated theories modelling Council decision-making (Steunenberg 1994; Tsebelis 1994; Crombez 1996, 1997; König and Proksch 2006a); and the predictive power of some of those models has been tested and compared relying on painstakingly collected positional and salience data (Thomson et al. 2006; Thomson 2011). Yet, systematic empirical analyses that open up the black box of the Council's internal decision-making process are largely missing. In recent years, a number of studies have examined the voting behaviour (Mattila and Lane 2001; Mattila 2004; Heisenberg 2005; Hayes-Renshaw et al. 2006; Hagemann 2007; Mattila 2009; Plechanovová 2011) and co-operation patterns (Beyers and Dierickx 1997, 1998; Naurin 2007) of Member States in the Council. While these studies might tell us something about the conflict dimensions underlying Council negotiations, they are silent on the internal decision-making process that leads to Council decisions. There are a growing number of works that investigate the internal working and organisation of the Parliament (Kaeding 2004, 2005; Hoyland 2006; McElroy and Benoit 2007; Rasmussen 2008; McElroy and Benoit 2010; Yordanova 2010), in particular the composition, functioning and effects of its system of standing committees (Bowler and Farrell 1995; Whitaker 2005; McElroy 2006; Settembri and Neuhold 2009; Yordanova 2009). Similar systematic quantitative or comparative research on the Council's internal workings is virtually non-existent.
