Abstract.  This article examines different views of the European Union (EU) legislative decision‐making process through a quantitative analysis of all Commission proposals initiated between 1984 and 1999. Using the positions of Member States, the analysis is innovative in two respects: the identification of the relative importance of institutions and preferences for the process of EU legislative decision making, and the empirical evaluation of the ongoing theoretical controversy between constructivists and spatial analysts about the converging or diverging effect of Member State positions. The findings reveal that the process of EU legislative integration is significantly slowing down, even though Council qualified majority voting facilitates decision making while parliamentary participation modestly increases the duration. Against the constructivist claims of convergence, the results show that the divergence of Member State positions significantly determines the duration of the legislative process, in particular in the key domains of EU integration: the larger the distance between the Member States' positions, the longer the EU decision‐making process takes. This suggests that the accession of countries with diverging positions will slow down the EU's legislative process, but institutional reform of the Council's decision‐making threshold is a promising solution for coping with this effect.

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The bargaining product of the Amsterdam Intergovernmental Conference—the Amsterdam Treaty—dwindled down the draft proposal to a consensus set of all fifteen member states of the European Union (EU). Using the two-level concept of international bargains, we provide a thorough analysis of how this consensus set was reached by issue subtraction with respect to domestic ratification constraints. Drawing on data sets covering the positions of all negotiating actors and ratifying national political parties, we first highlight the differences in the Amsterdam ratification procedures in the fifteen member states of the EU. This analysis allows us to compare the varying ratification difficulties in each country. Second, our empirical analysis of the treaty negotiations shows that member states excluded half of the Amsterdam bargaining issues to secure a smooth ratification. Because member states with higher domestic ratification constraints performed better in eliminating uncomfortable issues at the Amsterdam Intergovernmental Conference, issue subtraction can be explained by the extent to which the negotiators were constrained by domestic interests.

EC directives must be transposed into the national legal order of the member states within a specified deadline. Although member states are obliged to notify their transposition measures, they often fail to comply with these deadlines. Distinguishing between domestic and EU-related factors, this study examines transposition failure and delay of EC directives from 1986 to 2002. Notification failure is found to be more likely when there is conflict between the member states during the EU legislative process. National patterns of transposition timeliness are shown to vary significantly, and higher levels of complexity and increased use of parliamentary legislation, as well as more federalist and pluralist structures, contribute to delayed compliance.

[1] In this study a new empirical approach to retrieve integral ocean wave parameters from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is presented. The idea behind this computationally efficient technique is to estimate integral ocean wave parameters without the intermediate step of retrieving the two-dimensional ocean wave spectrum. The method has the radiometrically calibrated SAR image as the only source of information and is based on a quadratic model function with 22 input parameters. These parameters include the radar cross section, the image variance, and 20 parameters computed from the SAR image variance spectrum using a set of orthonormal functions. The coefficients of the quadratic function were fitted for the estimation of H s , the mean periods T m01 , T m02 , T À10 , the wave power, and the wave heights associated with different spectral bands. The fit procedure is based on a stepwise regression method. A data set of 12,000 globally distributed ERS-2 wave mode image spectra and colocated WAM ocean wave spectra was available for the study. Two separate subsets of 6000 collocation pairs each were used to fit the model and to carry out comparisons of the retrieved wave parameters with numerical model results. Additional comparisons were performed using NDBC buoy measurements. Scatterplots and global maps with the derived parameters are presented. It is shown that the rms of the SAR derived H s with respect to the WAM H s is about 0.5 m. For the mean period T mÀ10 an rms of 0.72 s with a high-frequency cutoff period of about 6 s is achieved.