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The core or the winset? Explaining decision-making duration and policy change in the European Union

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article examines to what extent different formal conceptualizations of ideological conflict can help to explain the capacity for and speed of policy change in the European Union (EU). We compare the core and the winset, two competing concepts based on the spatial theory of voting. The empirical analysis shows that the latter concept bears a strong and systematic influence on decision making in the EU. The smaller the winset containing the outcomes that a majority of actors in the Council of the EU prefers over the status quo, the longer a decision-making process lasts and the smaller the potential for policy change.

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Notes

  1. We dropped all issues with four or more missing values for member states’ ideal point positions, a missing value for the Commission position, a missing value for the EP for co-decision cases, a missing outcome value or a missing value for the status quo. This reduced the original data set by 61 issues, among which there were eight complete proposals. The sample we use has a total of 62 proposals consisting of 113 issues. For cases with four or less missing values, the values were imputed by viewing the member state’s position as indifferent to the status quo (Steunenberg and Selck, 2006, 70).

  2. While Ganghof (2003) makes a distinction between outcome preferences, positional preferences and final preferences, we measure like most spatial models negotiation positions of veto players regarding specific policy proposals tabled by the European Commission.

  3. The data represent different measurement levels which vary between dichotomous, ordinal and metric scales. We therefore used a mixture of dimension-reduction techniques and qualitative considerations to determine the relevant number of conflict dimensions (Zimmer et al, 2005). If the results of the principal components analysis, the correspondence analysis and a substantial examination of the content of two statistically clearly correlated issues were confirmative, we assumed that two, or sometimes three, issues could be traced back to one underlying conflict dimension. The results of these three analyses were mostly in line with each other and led to a unique number as well as a substantive ‘label’ for the aggregated dimensions in all of the 18 cases where the number of dimensions has been reduced.

  4. Depending on the decision rule applied, the Council core is the convex hull of the ideal points of all member states in case of unanimity or the area defined by the q-dividers in the event that a qualified majority threshold is used. A q-divider is a line that connects the ideal points of two actors who are pivotal for a possible winning coalition (the lines defining the centrally located heptagon in Figure 1). Each q-divider thus separates the policies preferred by this majority coalition and those preferred by a losing minority of actors or votes. The centrally located polygon formed by all q-dividers is the set of points that are never on the ‘losing side’ of a q-divider, that is, there exists no coalition preferring a point outside the core.

  5. The five-out-of-seven-rule roughly corresponds to the voting threshold under QMV in the EU Council of Ministers.

  6. Golub (2007) argues that studies of EU decision-making speed should account for state changes in variables, as all important variables are likely to change over time as a result of, for example, EU treaty reform or enlargement, government change or new modes of actor behavior. We expect that the effects of certain of our independent variables change over time, and therefore account for time-dependent coefficients. However, it has to be acknowledged that the composition of governments might have changed because of national elections over the course of the legislative process. Given that the DEU dataset only measured the policy positions immediately after the introduction of the Commission proposal, we are not able to take state changes in the ideological composition of the Council into account (Thomson and Stokman, 2006, p. 38).

  7. We conducted correlation and variance inflation tests and found heteroskedasticity to represent no problem.

  8. We ran two model specifications interacting each of the non-proportional covariates with time and ln(time). Both models arrive at the same substantial findings with regard to our explanatory variables. As the fit of the model including time interactions is superior to the fit of the model using ln(time) interactions, we only present the time interaction model.

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Acknowledgements

Financial assistance by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Baden-Württemberg Graduate Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank Thomas König, Frans N. Stokman and Robert Thomson for valuable comments and suggestions. Replication data will be made available on www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Verwiss/GSchneider/downloads/daten.htm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Commission, Rue des Déportés 8/101, Clabecq, 1480, Belgium

    Dietrich Drüner

  2. Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Allende-Platz 1, Hamburg, 20146, Germany

    Heike Klüver

  3. Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, PO Box 9108, Nijmegen, 6500HK, The Netherlands

    Ellen Mastenbroek

  4. Department of Politics and Public Administration and Graduate School of Decision Sciences (GSDS), University of Konstanz, Box 86, Konstanz, 78457, Germany

    Gerald Schneider

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  1. Dietrich Drüner
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Correspondence to Dietrich Drüner.

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Drüner, D., Klüver, H., Mastenbroek, E. et al. The core or the winset? Explaining decision-making duration and policy change in the European Union. Comp Eur Polit 16, 271–289 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2015.26

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