Who's at the table? An analysis of ministers’ participation in EU Council of Ministers meetings

ABSTRACT

The Council of Ministers is an important part of EU decision-making. However, contrary to what is formally expected member, states are not always represented by ministers at Council meetings. Unfortunately, our knowledge of who is actually participating is limited. First, the article investigates the extent to which ministers actually participate in Council meetings. We conclude that a substantial number of the participants are not ministers. Second, based on an institutional approach, the article tests six hypotheses as to when ministers participate. Here, we find the salience of meetings, the importance of the policy area, the length of EU membership and a high share of EU-positive parties enhance the likelihood of ministerial participation. Finally, we test whether the existence of junior ministers affects the likelihood of politicians participating. Here, our findings are inconclusive. The article builds on a database including all participants in Council meetings between 2005 and 2009.

KEY WORDS:

• Civil servants
• Council of Ministers
• European Union
• ministerial representation
• ministers

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Linda Raabe Petersen, Ane Reese Mikkelsen and André Christensen for their research assistance. We would also like to thank the participants in the 2013 EGPA working group on EU administration and multilevel governance, Anne Rasmussen, Yosef Bhatti and the participants in the 2013 DSS panel on EU public administration, not least our discussant Jørgen Grønnegaard Christensen. Furthermore, we would like to thank our two anonymous reviewers. Finally, we would like to thank the Centre for European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, for generously funding our data collection.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website, doi: 10.1080/13501763.2014.983145.

Notes

1 The only variables which may interact are the salience of a given policy area and the number of b-points. However, these factors are both based on a rational behavioural logic, and the overlap hence seems less important than had the overlap been between rational and sociologically derived hypotheses.

2 Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

3 Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

4 Romania and Bulgaria.

5 For Romania and Bulgaria, the data are from 2007–2009 (Eurobarometer 2007, 2009).

6 Here and in the following sections, the margins are calculated based on model III of the full model, including variables, and hence excluding Malta and Cyprus. Using model II as basis, the percentages are the same, but standard deviations increase, reflecting the lower level of significance also identified in Table 2. All of the predictive margins are calculated at a confidence interval of 95 per cent.

7 Cf. note 6 above. There is a standard deviation of 0.7 per cent for old member states and 0.9 per cent for new member states; hence, the finding is significant.

Additional information

Biographical notes

Caroline Howard Grøn is an assistant professor working with EU public administration at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.

Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen is an associate professor of public administration at the Department of Political Science, Aalborg University, Denmark.