Survival Analysis and European Union Decision-making

Abstract

Practitioners as well as scholars of European integration have for decades debated why it takes so long for the European Union (EU) to adopt legislation and how to improve decision-making efficiency. Four studies have investigated decision-making speed using survival analysis, a particularly appropriate quantitative technique. In this paper I show that all four studies suffer from serious methodological problems that render their conclusions unreliable. I then outline where work in this area should focus, and take an initial step in this direction by fitting a methodologically more appropriate survival model to my 2002 EU decision-making data set (Golub, 2002). Substantively, the results indicate that throughout the EU's history, for the most important types of legislation, qualified majority voting (QMV) and EU enlargement have increased decision-making speed, whereas empowerment of the European Parliament and extreme preference heterogeneity amongst decision-makers have decreased it. Theoretically, formal approaches — spatial models and especially coalition theory — do a better job of explaining these results than do perspectives that privilege informal norms

The impact of the Eastern enlargement on the decision-making capacity of the European Union

“…Some studies argue that enlargement has or would slow down decision-making (Hertz and Leuffen 2011;König 2007). On the other hand Golub (2007) finds no effect of enlargements (his data do not include the Eastern enlargement) and Klüver and Sagarzazu (2013) report no effect of the number of member states and a negative effect of within-Council ideological diversity on legislative duration. Best and Settembri's (2008) descriptive analysis also finds no effect of the Eastern enlargement.…”

Ties to the Rest: Autocratic Linkages and Regime Survival

“…Finally, the occurrence of internal armed conflict is controlled for when testing the effect of migration linkage (Themner & Wallensteen, 2014 (Box-Steffensmeier & Zorn, 2001;Golub, 2007Golub, , 2008 We understand our linkage indicators as proxies of a country's overall linkage and put less emphasis on the specificities of individual linkage dimensions. (The exception here is proximity linkage, which is likely to be driving factor of all other linkage dimensions as well as a linkage indicator in its own right, and is thus entered as a control variable in all models.)…”

Vote Probabilities, Thresholds and Actor Preferences: Decision Capacity and the Council of the European Union

“…Nonetheless, calculations in Table 5 and Fig. 4 may illustrate why there is an apparent contradiction between empirical insights into the speed of EU decisionmaking (Golub 2002(Golub , 2007 and respective predictions of Council decision efficiency (Baldwin et al 2001;Leech 2002;Baldwin and Widgrén 2004;Hosli and Machover 2004) based on the formal voting rules. The assumption of higher probabilities of affirmative votes of EU states in Council voting procedures leads to a prediction of higher probabilities of the Council to act.…”

“…A study by Leech (2002) concurrently found that the high decision-making thresholds (both before and after the Treaty of Nice) have rendered EU decision-making decidedly rigid. Empirical studies nonetheless claim that the general pace of decision-making in the Council has not significantly decreased, even after the 2004 enlargement (Golub 2007;Hagemann and De Clerck-Sachsse 2007).…”