Contestation and responsiveness in EU Council deliberations

ABSTRACT

Decision-making in the Council of the European Union appears highly consensual at the voting stage. However, we focus on Council deliberations, where we find higher levels of contestation. What drives government opposition in the Council? Using a novel approach of studying the Council through video footage of its public deliberations (DICEU – Debates in the Council of the European Union), we demonstrate that contestation between governments is, at least in part, driven by their responsiveness to domestic public opinion. Analysing deliberations on legislative packages in the Economic and Financial Affairs Council between 2010 and 2015, we show that governments are responsive to public opinion when setting out their policy positions, but primarily when the policy issues are salient domestically. Our study thus contributes to our understanding of government responsiveness in the EU.

KEYWORDS:

• Contestation
• Council
• public opinion
• deliberations
• responsiveness

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Isabelle Brusselmans and her team in the Council Secretariat for their support in obtaining video footage from the Council, including archival material that was re-digitized for this project. The authors are also grateful to Rebecca Brooks, Sarah Ciaglia, Rebecca Kittel, Carolyn Konopka, Jason Krstic, Lukas Lehner, Julia Leschke, Ida Popovski, Pit Rieger, and Tim Rogers for their excellent research assistance, and to Edoardo Bressanelli, Fabio Franchino, Christel Koop, Filip Kostelka, Christine Reh, Thomas Saalfeld and the late John Peterson for insightful comments on previous versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes on contributors

Sara B. Hobolt is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions and professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Christopher Wratil is Lecturer in European Politics at University College London.

ORCID

Sara B. Hobolt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9742-9502

Christopher Wratil http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7339-9628

Notes

1 As an illustration, we have included several extracts from the debates in the Supplemental Material.

2 Note that the varying meanings of disapproval across debates and at different negotiation stages may lead to measurement error, which is why we control for the negotiation stage in all main models.

3 Eight debates were discussions of presidency work programmes, and hence no official votes on these matters are recorded, and 23 debates were on legislative files without an official vote or without reporting it. As a result, we lack voting data on 31 of our 89 (34%) DICEU debates. This highlights that voting data neglects a substantial part of intergovernmental politics in the Council. In fact, we have no official Council votes on some of the most significant ECOFIN proposals discussed during the last years, most prominently the Commission’s proposal for a financial transaction tax – the most frequently debated legislative proposal in the DICEU dataset (8 debates).

4 Note that ECOFIN deals primarily with the annual budget and not the multiannual financial framework.

5 We chose these categories guided by the availability of public opinion data on each of them.

6 The number of survey waves available varies between the opinion measures (e.g. from only two waves for the EU budget to frequent half-yearly estimates of opinion for the FTT). In the Supplemental Material, we also show that our results hold when interpolating between opinion surveys and using a six-month lag or current opinion.

7 We acknowledge that media attention is a noisy indicator of public salience. In some instances, the very failure of governments to respond to public opinion may fuel media stories. In such cases, attention is more a consequence than a predictor of responsiveness.

8 Note that we omit data for Malta from Figure 1, since the Maltese media data are very noisy due to the fact that the average number of articles on a legislative package in the six-month period preceding a Council meeting is just 3.6, while it is above 39 for all other countries.

9 In the Supplemental Material, we show that when we only use our sample of nine countries for which we have media data, and classify each country-package dyad according to whether average media coverage of a package in a country was below or above the country mean (as dummy variable), we obtain substantively the same results as in our main analyses. The same is the case when using an alternative measure of salience based on ‘don’t know’ responses in the Eurobarometer surveys.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung [grant number 20.16.0.045WW] and the Leverhulme Trust [grant number RF-2013-245].