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 decisionmaking. 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.

Participation of ministers in Council of the EU meetings: variation across members and decline over time

“…If the electorate is mostly hostile to the EU, a minister may see no benefits from participation in Council meetings. Previous studies, focusing on relatively small samples of empirical data, have tested the intuitive effect of public support for the EU, finding no evidence for their hypotheses expecting a positive relationship between public support for the EU and ministerial participation (Grøn and Salomonsen 2015;Kovář 2018). Our goal is to re-test the validity of these findings using a large amount of data, including from more recent periods.…”

“…Finally, both the policy agenda motivations and personal political considerations are reinforced when the minister comes from the country holding the Council presidency office. Its influential role in EU decision-making is well documented (Elgström 2006;Warntjen 2007;Tallberg 2010;Häge 2017), yet it has been omitted in an earlier study of ministerial participation in the Council by Grøn and Salomonsen (2015). Presidency represents a unique opportunity to shape the EU agenda, mediate negotiations, control decision-making procedures, and influence the final policy outcomes.…”

“…For that purpose, we include a year count variable with values ranging from 1 (year 2004) to 11 (year 2014). Second, we include information on policy areas, distinguishing Council sessions according to EU policy competencies, using the classification of Grøn and Salomonsen (2015) -from high competence (agriculture, competitiveness, general affairs), to shared (foreign and economic affairs, justice, transport or environment), to low (social issues, education, culture). 9 Third, we control for the distance between each member state's capital city and Brussels, as measured in kilometers.…”

“…And what are the factors associated with this choice, or the conditions under which ministers themselves choose to go to Brussels? So far, there is but one scholarly study that bears directly on our focus of inquiry; it uses data for the period 2005 to 2009 (Grøn and Salomonsen 2015). There are also studies focusing, in some detail, on individual EU members (Kovář 2018;Kovář and Kovář 2021) and several reports by EU-oriented think tanks (European Values 2015;Think Tank Europa 2018).…”

Multi-level, Multi-actor and Multi-issue Dimensions of Governance of the European Higher Education Area, and Beyond

“…This approach reflects more general studies of political salience of European level policy developments (see e.g. Grøn and Salomonsen 2015), in which the basic premise is that the political rank of those "sitting at the table" matters, as well as that for successful lobbying it is often important to show both "strength in rank" as well as "strength in numbers".…”